


Always Stay Near Me, For Tomorrow I Will Have Much To Do

by roguewrld



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AOS S2 compliant, Assumed (but not actual) Major Character Death, Bucky doesn't remember Steve is Captain America, Coulson's team has trust issues, F/M, Hallucinations, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Asset's horrific treatment by HYDRA, background Jemma/Trip, background Natasha/Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 17:32:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2590169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguewrld/pseuds/roguewrld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After saving Captain America, the Asset goes into hiding. His memories start returning in pieces, including the love of his life left behind in Brooklyn and the relationship he had with Captain America during the war. </p>
<p>Unable to reconcile his memories of Captain America and pre-Serum Steve, Bucky believes he's dead. On the advice of the vivid hallucination he's having of Steve, Bucky Barnes seeks help in his fight against HYDRA from Director Coulson's newly reformed SHIELD.</p>
<p>*set in between the last scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the Smithsonian stinger*</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.
> 
> Joan of Arc
> 
> My thanks to brezcu for getting me started and Rekishi for her extensive betaing. This is a much better story for their influence. 
> 
> Art provided by the extremely talented biggrstaffbunch. She did a wonderful job and I'm so happy she picked me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the third night, the Asset dreamed.

> The Asset (Code Name: Winter Soldier) is a very sophisticated tool and must be treated as such.  Improper handling may lead to the Asset behaving unpredictably and responding to his keepers with violence. When protocol is followed the Asset has never failed to complete a mission.
> 
> ...
> 
> Standard skill loadout for the Asset includes knowledge of all standard weaponry produced in the last eighty years as well as verbal and written comprehension of the world's most common languages. (See Appendix E for a comprehensive list)
> 
> ...
> 
> Due to limitations in the behavioral conditioning the Asset is not recommended for missions exceeding 72 hours without supplemental maintenance. Even with these precautions, longer missions necessitate close monitoring. If at any point in his mission the Asset becomes unstable his handlers must take corrective action up to and including a full reboot.
> 
> ...
> 
> As part of every mission loadout the Asset is given a homing order. If he becomes separated from his handlers the Asset will be compelled to seek the nearest owner-designated safe house and await retrieval.
> 
>      - Excerpts from "User Guide: Winter Soldier" Version 11.02

 

**April 2014**

A small house in one of DC’s bedroom communities was actually a HYDRA safe house. That was where the Asset went, after he fished Captain America out of the Potomac and left him on the banks for his allies to find. The Asset didn’t know why he had done it, but in the moment there had been no other choice. He had been compelled to save the Captain, even though the Asset had taken considerable personal damage during their encounter.   

The house was empty. Protocol dictated that whenever possible a retrieval team would be waiting for him. In their absence, the Asset would need to perform basic maintenance on himself.

The river water had left a stench on his skin and it would compromise the healing of his wounds. Cleaning his skin would allow him to heal faster, but he could barely move the arm that was still flesh. The Captain had dislocated his shoulder and the Asset put it back into place. There was no one to hear him scream.

The hygiene products in the bathroom had instructions and the Asset utilized them in water so hot the room filled with steam and turned his skin pink. As he scrubbed the dirt and discomfort off, the deep ache in his shoulder got easier to bear.

He walked naked through the house to the panic room, leaving wet footprints and drips of water as he went. A well-stocked first aid kit sat prominently on one of the shelves and the Asset took bandages and a sling. He dried off, then sat on the floor to bandage his wounds and placed his arm in the sling.

Without the retrieval team to perform repairs, the Asset would need to rely on his healing factor. The serum was at its most effective when he was well rested so the Asset would need to sleep. He took a pair of loose pants from one of the bins of clothing in the panic room. For some reason, the idea of sleeping naked disturbed him. 

Sleeping on the floor was contraindicated when he was injured, so the Asset went into the bedroom. The mattress was bare although there was a stack of linens in one of the closets. He didn’t bother with them, someone would be here for him soon. He curled up in the middle of the bed with a blanket and rested.

He slept, eight hours of perfect blackness, and woke to the light coming through the curtains. His shoulder didn’t hurt anymore and his cuts were healed. He took off the sling and peeled his bandages off.

Protocol dictated he should eat. The pantry had canned foods. The Asset selected one at random and took it to the communications room. He put the HYDRA emergency channel on one screen and a local news station on another. The can contained cut green beans and the Asset ate them while the FBI arrested Senator Stern live on television.

He shouldn’t have saved the Captain. The Asset wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but once it was there he couldn’t get rid of it. He had disobeyed orders. Pierce would be displeased. The Asset’s muscles tensed. He didn’t know why.

On the second day, he had intended to watch the news channels all day again, but the urge to turn off the screens had become unbearable after he saw them carry Pierce’s body out of the wreckage of the Triskelion. The Asset retreated to the panic room and cleaned every weapon in the gun safe. He had no reason to, he had no orders to perform maintenance, but seeing the footage of Pierce’s body made him feel strange. Performing the maintenance made the uncomfortable sensation go away. When he finally went back to the bedroom to sleep, he put the fitted sheet on the mattress.

He woke up the third morning to the sound of birds. He didn’t get out of bed right away. His sleep periods had always been tightly controlled to optimize his performance but now he had no mission, no urgent task he needed to accomplish for his handler, no handler at all with Pierce dead.

With no reason not to stay in bed, the Asset closed his eyes, rolled over and decided to go back to sleep.

When he woke up again, the clock by the side of the bed read 10:00 and the sunlight was falling on his face. He made his way to the kitchen to grab another can at random, but when his hand closed around a can of baked beans he hesitated.

He didn’t want to eat another can of cold food. He required twice the calories an average human man would and there was something unsatisfying about the canned food that made it hard to consume the required amounts. He went to the refrigerator and found it empty except for condiments, but the freezer was full. He took a package of sausage out and read the instructions.

Apparently cooking in a kitchen was very similar to the skills provided in his wilderness survival protocols. It was simple enough to find a frying pan and brown the sausages. As they sizzled and the smell of cooking pork filled the kitchen, he wondered why he’d been eating the food cold in the first place.

The front of the sausage box showed a cup of coffee sitting next to the food. He’d seen coffee in the pantry. Should he have been drinking coffee the past two days? Was coffee important? He’d been told to eat, to hydrate, but maybe there were other rules for longer missions.

When he went to watch the monitors, he used the computer to research coffee. People felt very strongly about it, how it was grown and prepared and whether it should be consumed at all. Since it had been in the pantry, the Asset had to assume HYDRA was in favor of coffee. He found the instruction manual for the safe house’s drip pot and watched it brew. It tasted strong and bitter. He took the cup and sausage back to the panic room.

The news was covering the fall of the Triskelion 24/7 and over the HYDRA emergency channel the Soldier listened as SHIELD bases were retaken by their host nations' armies. HYDRA was on the run. At six, he was still alone in the safe house. They had never waited so long to retrieve him before. He found a can of soup and heated it up for dinner. At midnight, he listened to a lone HYDRA operative beg for help. The Chinese military was breaking into his safe house. No one responded. The Asset turned the equipment off and went to the bedroom. He put a pillowcase on the pillow. It hid the strange brown stains and smelled 

On the third night, the Asset dreamed.

* * *

_**Summer of 1939** _

_They had been saving their pennies for a while, until they’d managed to scrape up enough for two tickets and a couple hot dogs. After all that trouble, a crack of thunder woke them up on game day. Rain was blowing in through their open window and the curtains billowed in the strong wind. You couldn’t play baseball in a downpour._

_Steve muttered, “Raincheck?”, without even opening his eyes._

_“Yeah.” Bucky rolled over so they were practically nose to nose. The rain had cooled off their apartment. Last night it had been too hot to be close. “Already took the day off though. Gonna make it worth my while?”_

_“Dunno if I can live up to baseball.” Bucky gave him a little shove and Steve went over onto his back. “Come here.”_

_The low music coming through the wall from Mrs. David’s apartment was a reminder that it was daytime on Sunday, people were home and awake and the walls here were thin. They couldn’t let anyone catch them, but for once they had all the time in the world._

_Of course, Steve wasn’t a big fan of taking their time. If Bucky had to describe what Steve was like in bed, the first thing that came to mind was ‘fast.’ Maybe that wasn’t fair, but two years ago they had gone from that first tentative kiss, whiskey making them brave, to hand jobs in about half an hour. It wasn’t desperation or even how badly he wanted Bucky, he was just always in a hurry._

_It was only a problem on mornings like this. The sound of the pounding rain against their window always made everything feel more intense. They were both naked already and pressed together, no reason not to go full steam ahead, but he hardly ever got to just make out with Steve._

_Steve was rubbing against his hip, trying to speed things up but just this once, they were going to take their time. He caught Steve’s wrists and pinned them to the mattress above his head. “Let me kiss you for a while.”_

_He could kiss Steve for hours, if he thought he could get away with it. Immobilizing Steve got him five minutes though, until Steve’s squirming took on a desperate quality and his kisses started to have teeth. Bucky reached for the petroleum jelly and Steve pulled away, panting and already impatient. “Bucky, please.”_

_“Give me a minute to get you ready.” He slid his hand down Steve’s belly to give his cock a few strokes before slicking his fingers. Bucky loved the noises Steve made when he touched him, a sharp exhale of breath like he’d been punched that faded into a low moan of pleasure. He had to hold himself back, though, because Steve had no sense of self-preservation._

_“Hurry.” His lips were red and slick and Bucky got a bit sidetracked by them again until Steve was grinding against his fingers. “Come on. Now.” They never quite managed slow, not when Steve was on the bottom. Even when Bucky tried to make it last, Steve fucked like he was running a race. “Want you to fuck me. Please.”_

_Bucky pressed in and Steve shoved his hips forward with a gasp. “Jesus, Steve. Slow down a bit.”_

_“I can take it.”_

_“Why are you always in such a hurry?” He pushed Steve’s hips down against the mattress. “We have all day, it’s not like we’re trying to get done before my wife gets home. Just let me take care of you, okay?”_

_He let Bucky take the lead and for once they took their time. They ended up with Steve bent in half as they rocked together, his legs hooked on Bucky’s elbows. Bucky pressed a kiss to the crook of Steve’s neck. “See. Sometimes I have good ideas.”_

_“Shut up.”_

_Bucky pushed deep and Steve shuddered and came. God, that was the best feeling. He sped up a little and took what he needed, mouth pressed to Steve’s to keep the noises from drifting through the thin walls. When he was done, he pulled away and rolled off to the side since Steve wasn’t a big fan of being crushed post-coital._

_He found himself staring at the ceiling as his sweat dried. Nothing he’d ever done, no one else he’d ever been with, could live up to Steve and the way their bodies fit together._

_One of Steve’s hands groped for his and Bucky caught it, laced their fingers together. “You don’t need to go easy on me, Bucky. I can keep up.”_

_“Who says it’s for you?” Bucky gave a tug and Steve shifted close so they could spoon together. He buried his face in the crook of Steve’s neck because really, Steve was his world and everyone knew it, everyone but Steve seemed to understand. “Maybe I want to be gentle, show you I love you.”_

_“Love you too.”  They fell back asleep, tangled up with each other._

* * *

The Asset woke up alone in an empty bed. He had strict orders to report if anything unusual happened while he slept, but he had no one to report to. Had this been a dream? He’d overheard other men on missions talking about their dreams, about falling and failing and fucking.

 It hadn’t felt like a mission. The Asset was not typically sent on seduction missions and if he’d been under orders he would have obeyed the target’s requests instead of pursuing his own desires. There had been something genuine about the affection he’d felt for the other man. It had to have been a dream, something his mind had pieced together from half-remembered missions and details he’d heard from his support teams.

Or maybe it had been a nightmare. The men had talked about those, too. Love was a weakness, a weapon to use against targets. The Asset wasn’t supposed to have weaknesses. He flexed his metal hand and reminded himself what he was, what he did, then he shoved the blankets aside and got out of bed.

He would follow orders, he would obey. Someone would come for him and they would make the dreams go away, things would go back to the way they had always been.

The Asset ran through his hygiene and maintenance routines. Showering took longer than normal, he had to get rid of the erection the dream had given him. He used his cybernetic hand to brace himself against the wall and used the other one to jerk himself off. At first, he was only thinking about the optimal amount of friction to apply, but that led his mind to the dream, to how it had felt to be inside Steve. The sensation from his palm paled in comparison to that, but thinking about it made the job easier.

When he was done showering, the evidence of his strange morning washed down the drain, he carefully dried off his arm and lubricated the joints. He took a shirt and pants in his size from the bin of clothes and wondered why the shirt seemed wrong somehow.

When he slid the clothes on the wrongness of the shirt continued to nag at him. The Asset couldn’t define what was wrong with it. The shirt fit him correctly and wasn’t physically uncomfortable but there was still something wrong with it.  The next shirt on the pile, a light blue shirt of an identical style, caused no unpleasant feelings. The Asset changed into it and left the first shirt, lime green, in a puddle on the tile floor.

Something about the empty refrigerator was disturbing, a refrigerator should contain food and its absence was undesirable. He made a pot of coffee and poured himself a cup. Today, he stirred in a spoonful of sugar like he’d seen a woman do in a commercial on the TV yesterday. It tasted better that way. She’d added milk as well, but he didn’t have any.

He toasted a packet of toaster pastries and took them into the panic room so he could eat while he worked. He was running behind schedule, and when he turned on the emergency channel, someone from Garrett’s team was begging for assistance. Someone had broken into Cybertek and liberated all the assets and handlers. He turned the other monitor on and CNN showed people being loaded onto busses for transport to hospitals. A reporter droned on about the unethical human experimentation that had been uncovered.

* * *

_**Winter of 1960** _

_T_ _he doctor tightened the strap across his chest. "We should remove the whole upper plate and replace it. Do I have your permission to proceed? He may be out of commission for a day."_

_"Go ahead. We need him in peak condition for Tuesday." His new handler was sitting in the corner, watching the procedure while smoking a cigarette. "Wouldn't it be easier for you if he was unconscious?"_

_"The Asset is highly resistant to sedation. This will be faster." The doctor picked up a blowtorch. "Now lie still. If you move, I may slip."_

* * *

The Asset jerked back to the present. His stomach was rolling for some reason and he sat still until it seemed to pass.

Still, he had gained valuable information. No one would be coming from Cybertek to repair him.

He drank his coffee and watched the news. He couldn’t give the task his full attention, he couldn’t stop thinking about the refrigerator. It was so clearly wrong for it to be empty. He needed to do something about it. He’d located money in the panic room and a car in the garage. He could go somewhere and buy food, although the exact logistics of the task were unclear.

The internet produced a list of local grocery stores and when he clicked on the first link the store advertised its delivery service. The Soldier spent most of the day going through the catalog of available products, but there were too many choices. The store stocked seventeen kinds of peanut butter.

Another round of searching turned up a blog run by a woman who provided a weekly list of the best deals for the store. He used her blog as a mission briefing and put together a shopping list.

When he was done selecting enough fresh food to power his enhanced metabolism for a week the final total, almost $200, gave him the same sensation the shirt had. He swapped the green apples for red but it didn’t produce a similar sensation of relief so he wasn’t sure how to correct it. He scheduled a delivery for the next morning.

The groceries handled, he turned his mind to his maintenance issues. The Asset had been loaned out to other organizations before, they would have required instructions on his proper use. A check of the secure server in the panic room turned up a manual.

The text gave him an explanation for the strange dreams. He was well outside the optimal time window to run missions. He should have been wiped and put back on ice days ago. Dreams were high on the list of indications his conditioning was breaking down. Erratic behavior would come next. He was hiding, he couldn’t start behaving erratically. The neighbors might notice. He and Steve had had nosey neighbors-

The Asset shook his head. No, that hadn’t been real. He needed to stay focused. He flipped through the rest of the introduction, hoping to find instructions for increasing his operational time. He was out of luck, the suggestion was to wipe him mid-mission if it became necessary.

The first chapter had full color photos of the proper way to restrain and wipe him and the photos produced such a strong sense of discomfort that he had to close the document. His vision blanked out and when it came back he found himself out in the hallway, on his knees and vomiting. He was shivering, even though the hallway was the same ambient temperature it had been before.

The Asset was highly resistant to disease, and nausea wasn’t on the list of side effects from being active too long. He had observed similar behavior in targets, when they slipped into shock, but the Asset wasn’t wounded. Something was very wrong.

He cleaned up the mess and got a notebook from storage. If he was inoperative by the time a retrieval team arrived, they would need information. ‘Dreams began after three days in the safe house. Reading about maintenance procedures induced vomiting...’

* * *

_**Fall of 1938** _

_They were spending the afternoon being bums in the living room, surrounded by stacks of comic books and pulp magazines._

_If they’d been at his place, they could have spent the afternoon in bed but Steve had wanted to come over here instead. That was fine, they could still spend time together without having sex. A few weeks couldn’t change the past twelve years of their lives._

_Bucky heard a clatter of shoes in the hallway just before Becca burst into the living room. “Steve, you’re here!” His little sister was completely obsessed with Steve. Bucky sympathized. Maybe it ran in the family. She sat down next to him on the couch, so close that if it had been anyone but Steve, Bucky would have had to start defending his sister’s honor. “What are you reading?”_

_“ Astounding Stories.” Steve edged away from her a little. Every other woman on the planet seemed to look right through Steve, but Becca noticed him. Bucky thought it was hilarious how uncomfortable it made him. _

_She did that thing girls did where they flipped their hair back and gave him a smile. “Would you read to me? You used to read to me all the time.”_

_“You used to be eight. Read it yourself.” It wasn’t funny, all of a sudden. He wasn’t sharing Steve with Becca, that went too far._

_“Don’t tell me what to do.” Becca put a hand on Steve’s knee. “How’s your mom, Steve?”_

_Steve was staring at her hand like it was a shackle. “She’s doing better. I’ll tell her you asked.”_

_“Becca, you leave your brother and Steve alone.” His mother appeared in the doorway to save Steve. Maybe that ran in the family too. “Steve, you’re staying until dinner. You can take home some pot roast for Sarah and save me a trip.”_

_“You don’t have to-”_

_Bucky clapped a hand over Steve’s mouth. They were all sick of hearing Steve say he didn’t need anything. “He’s staying, Ma. He’ll peel all the potatoes for you too.” When Steve had a chore it let him feel like he was paying them back a little._

_“That’s what I like to hear.” She patted Steve on the head, like they were still kids. “Becca, you come help me with the groceries so I don’t have to climb the step stool.”_

_Becca slipped from the couch, a little too slowly. “Bye, Steve. See you later.”_

_Bucky dropped his hand. “You’re so stubborn.” When Steve didn’t answer, Bucky took a good look at him. He was shaking, a little. “Steve?”_

_“I shouldn’t need help to take care of my family.” He shoved Bucky away, started gathering up his books. If they left them out, Bucky’s little brothers would steal and ruin them. “I shouldn’t need your mother’s charity.” His breath was already coming too fast._

_“It’s not charity.” Bucky dropped next to Steve on the couch and put his arms around him. “It’s dinner for a sick friend. Not everything is about you, Steve.”_

_Steve made a noise like a wounded animal, head pressed against Bucky’s chest. “I lied. I lied and she’s dying and there’s nothing I can do.” Steve’s words were muffled against his shirt and Bucky looked over his shoulder to see his mother in the doorway. She’d heard. Sarah was a friend and they’d all known, but to hear the words was hard._

_“Come on.” He pulled Steve to his feet. He couldn’t just leave the guy here, he didn’t need an audience for his breakdown. He tugged Steve into the room he shared with his brothers. It was empty, thank God, and his bed was a mess, but Steve wasn’t fussy about that. He dropped Steve onto the bed and pulled off his shoes. “You’re okay, it’s okay.”_

_“It’s really not, Buck.” He was wheezing, damn it._

_“Just lie there for a few minutes, okay? I’m going to get you some coffee, see if we can trick your lungs into working.” If that didn’t work, they’d have to put him in the tub._

_Steve didn’t answer, just rolled to face the wall, curling up into a little wheezing ball of misery. Relaxing was supposed to help, although it never did much for Steve. Bucky wanted to climb in beside him, lie together and breathe with him, but his siblings were nosey. “I’ll be right back, Steve.”_

_His mother already had the coffee perk on the stove and she was wiping at her eyes. “You need to start working on him now, get him to agree to move in once Sarah passes.”_

_If they did that, they’d never get another moment alone. “Sure, Ma. Thank you.” No, what they needed was their own place. Bucky thought he could swing it, if they were careful and Steve managed to work a little._

_He grabbed the paring knife from the block and picked up a potato. He could make himself useful, at least, while he waited for the water to boil._

* * *

“No.” The Asset opened his eyes and stared blankly at the textured ceiling, the slow loop of the ceiling fan. “No, I don’t believe it. It’s not real.”

He was a weapon. The thought that he had once shared an apartment and bed with a small, thin man named Steve was incredulous enough, but the new dream was far beyond that. Weapons didn’t have mothers or little sisters. They didn’t have friends and lovers.

He had to get up, the grocery truck would be here soon. It was important that he stay on task and not let the dreams distract him. The delivery man was cheerful and tried to make conversation but the Soldier just stared at him and handed him a stack of bills. What was there to talk about? Why should he care that it was sunny?

He tipped the man. People remembered when you didn't tip, the Asset was sure of that even though he didn't know why.

As he put the food away, his mind drifted back to the dream. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Steve curled up in his bed and the way that woman’s kitchen had smelled, like roasting meat and garlic. A simple physical relationship would have been a violation of protocol but comprehensible. Instead, he was dreaming about love and pulp magazines.

Focus. He needed to eat. He started the coffee and while it brewed he made eggs. He cracked two eggs into a frying pan and turned the heat on. Right away, he could tell he’d done something wrong. On the TV, the eggs had sizzled when they’d hit the pan and when he tried to flip them they stuck and started leaking yolk.

The resulting food looked nothing like the fried eggs he’d observed but he ate them anyway, at the kitchen table. That was what it was for, as far as he could tell. He used the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table to season the eggs. They tasted fine, better than toaster pastries, even if they looked wrong. He wasn’t sure how to clean the pan. Was it like sanitizing a crime scene or like bathing?

He needed to go monitor the emergency channel, but suddenly he couldn’t see the point. Pierce was dead. Sitwell was dead. Garrett was dead. The only people on the emergency channel were cells reporting in before they went dark, back into the shadows. No one was coming.

The thought produced no anxiety, the eggs stayed in his stomach. He said it again, out loud this time, to the empty house. “No one is coming.”

The Asset gazed down at his empty plate, tiny flakes of yellow on white ceramic. If no one was coming, that meant there would be no more orders. What was he supposed to do without orders?

If Captain America was to be believed, if his own dreams were true, then he had once been a man named James Barnes. He’d been a person, with a mother and a family and… and Steve. Steve was real.

He went and got his notebook. He tore out the page he’d written last night, no one would ever read it anyway, and started a new one. ‘I think a man named Steve loved me once. I think I loved him 


	2. Bucky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hallucinations started at the six week mark.

**Safe House Week Two - April 2014**

The angle of the reporting was starting to change. A woman in a suit stood outside Stark Tower, reading from a file. “According to the information in the SHIELD data dump, the Hulk is actually the presumed-dead biochemist Doctor Robert Banner. He’s been living here, in Stark Tower, since the Battle for New York.” A middle aged man was walking towards the private entrance and she ambushed him, shoved a microphone into his face. “Doctor Banner! What do you have to say about claims that you should be made to pay reparations for the incident in the Bronx in 2008?”

The Asset thought Doctor Banner showed remarkable restraint when he simply said, “No comment,” instead of eliminating her for exposing him.

**Safe House Week Three - April 2014**

SHIELD had been keeping a list of people they called ‘Gifted’ and post-DC it had been leaked with everything else. The people on it had started reaching out to each other. The Asset found a group of them talking to each-other in a Subreddit.

 

 

> This whole ‘Gifted’ thing is bullshit. We need a cooler name.  
>  submitted 3 days ago by mandible_roses [M]  
>  136 comments  
>  Share
> 
>            bewitched_body 307 points 3 days ago  
>             Didn’t some guy write a genetics paper calling people like us Homo-Superior?
> 
>                       xrayseige 50 points 3 days ago  
>                        How about no? Let’s just Godwin this thread right away, people.  
>   
>                        stayontarget 26 points 3 days ago  
>                        Humans are SUPERIOR!
> 
>            troutlaw 72 points 3 days ago  
>             Why do we need to even label ourselves at all?

The discussion seemed to rapidly deteriorate from there and the Asset mentally crossed the Gifted off his potential allies list.

**Safe House Week Four - April 2014**

The neighbor to the right was lonely and nosey. Mrs. Avery had lost most of her eyesight though, so she wasn’t likely to recognize him from the clips they played on TV, especially now that his beard had come in. “You know, my granddaughter is single.”

The Asset put her garbage can down by the curb, not sure how to respond to that. “I don’t think that’s going to work, ma’am.”

“Why not?” She took hold of his arm, supposedly she walked unsteadily but the Asset thought she was just grabby, as they walked back towards her house. “She’s very pretty.”

“I’m sure she is.” The Asset opened the door for her and helped her back to her chair. Interacting with her could put him in danger, but for some reason it was important that she was safe. Her family didn’t check on her frequently enough, it was good her granddaughter was coming.

“She’ll be here tonight to do my hair. You could come for dinner.” Mrs. Avery felt around for her eyeglasses, for all the good they would do her. She slipped them on and peered at him.

“I have someone. At home.” Home being the apartment he’d shared with Steve, four hundred miles and seventy years ago, but what Mrs. Avery didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

“Oh.” Mrs. Avery just sighed and turned on the TV. “Well, that’s a shame for Susie. You seem like such a nice young man.”

**Safe House Week Five - May 2014**

The Asset had never killed without an order before but he had reached his limit of television news and internet searches. The commentators had begun detailed but flawed analysis of the actions of Captain America and the Black Widow’s actions and the urge to correct them was too strong.

He took a furlough from surveillance. There had been a battered paperback underneath the bed and the Asset sat down on the couch in the living room for the first time and began to read. The text seemed familiar.

>   _In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.c_

* * *

_**March 1942** _

_Steve did up the buttons of his dress shirt. “It looks good on you.”_

_His uniform had ended up scattered across the apartment last night and Bucky been joking when he’d asked Steve to help him get dressed. Steve had taken him seriously. It wasn’t a joke, it was damn sad. “Funny. You couldn’t wait to get me out of it last night.”_

_Steve picked up the tie from the kitchen table, ran it through his fingers before he looped it around Bucky’s neck. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do, before a guy ships out? Give him something to remember, something to come home for?”_

_“Steve,” He would have enlisted in a heartbeat if Steve had scammed some doctor into passing him, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, a letter had arrived with the words ‘Order to Report For Induction’ across the top. He hadn’t ever meant to leave Steve behind and he almost told him everything but Steve yanked on the tie, a little too hard, and the moment passed. Better that Steve thought he was doing this of his own free will. “I’ll-”_

_“Don’t make me any promises you can’t keep, Buck.” Steve picked up the hat and set it on top of Bucky’s head. “Besides, I’m right behind you.”_

_“Then I'll see you there.” A couple guys they knew had scraped together money for rings and left behind brides, not girlfriends, so even if they never came back their wives would get some life insurance money. Some less scrupulous guys had used it as a way to get women to go to bed with them. It all ended up the same way, a man and a woman in a desperate embrace on the train platforms. Bucky and Steve didn’t even have that little luxury of kissing goodbye in public so they did it here. He was certain it was every bit as desperate as any kiss they’d witnessed on a train platform and Bucky was going to pretend, just like those strangers at the train station did, that he knew for certain it wouldn’t be the last time._

_He wasn’t sure he was convincing but when they finally pulled away Steve, at least, was dry-eyed. “We need to go. You’ll miss your train.”_

* * *

**Safe House Week Six - May 2014**

The hallucinations started at the six week mark.

He woke up in his safe house bed, the ghost of that kiss still on his mouth. The Asset got out of bed and went into the kitchen, still dwelling on it. Had that been the last time?

He pulled the carton of oatmeal from the cupboard and went to grab the sugar bowl from the kitchen table. It took a second for him to realize he was awake, that what he was seeing wasn’t possible. Sitting in one of the kitchen chairs was Steve, looking exactly like he had in the Asset’s last dream. The Asset sat down. He suddenly didn’t want breakfast. “I’m malfunctioning.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” The hallucination appeared to be drinking coffee, even though the Asset knew he’d run out yesterday and the grocery delivery wasn’t due until ten. At least he was imagining Steve with accuracy. He had needed coffee in the morning, for his lungs. “Look, we need to talk. You can’t stay here, Bucky. You need to find a place to go, make a life for yourself.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say he wasn’t Bucky anymore, but it seemed an extra level of broken to start arguing with a hallucination. “I can’t.”

“You can. You’ve got a car. Pack a bag and let’s just leave.”

“I have nowhere to go, Steve.” This was a bad sign. The Asset hadn’t read anything in the manual about hallucinations, but then again he couldn’t read more than a few pages without getting sick so what did he know? He decided to just ignore the hallucination so he turned his back on it and started the water to boil for his oatmeal.

“You have milk in the fridge. Why are you making it with water?”

“Jesus, Steve. It’s not like you have to eat it.” He had a point though. There was another carton coming with the grocery delivery, the Asset could use up the last of what he had and drink his coffee black. He poured out the water and measured out a cup of milk instead.

“I’m just saying, you’re not thinking things through. You’re still in survival mode. You should leave.”

The Asset stared at the milk in the sauce pan, wishing it would boil faster. Then again, hadn’t his mother told him a watched pot never boiled? “I’m a genetically modified super soldier having hallucinations of my dead lover, Steve. I’m not sure I want to work for someone that desperate.”

“It’s not desperate. Even before they took you, you were an amazing soldier. Now, you’re practically unstoppable. You’re rebuilding yourself from nothing, Bucky.” The hallucination was suddenly standing next to him, standing inside his personal space like Steve had always done. “Any group would be lucky to have you. Just pick one.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not really here. And your ideas always sucked.” The Asset’s memory wasn’t perfect, but he remembered the way keeping Steve alive had been a full time job. No matter how many times he got punched in the face or kicked in the stomach, he never learned. When he’d been Bucky Barnes, he’d never been able to walk past an alley without checking to make sure Steve wasn’t getting the crap beaten out of him in it. “I remember setting your nose twice. Bet it was more like ten or twelve times.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t matter. I’m still right.” The hallucination touched his arm, the one made of flesh. He couldn’t feel it. Small favors. “Bucky, no one is coming. Even if someone did, they’ll just wipe you and make you a weapon again. Please.”

It wasn’t actually Steve and the Asset knew it. It was just his own sense of self-preservation, waking up and doing battle with the remains of his HYDRA programming. The Asset had to admit, his brain was clever; having the idea to leave come from Steve. All of their lives, he’d never been able to say no to Steve.

* * *

He spent an hour after breakfast staring into the bathroom mirror. “James Barnes. My name is James Barnes, but you should call me Bucky.” The name felt strange in his mouth. He had known for weeks that he had been Bucky, he didn’t need to convince himself, but it sounded strange saying it aloud. “What kind of a name is Bucky?”

“Yours.” He could see Steve in the mirror, sitting on the edge of the tub.

“I know that.” The Asset shouldn’t talk to him like he was real, but it was hard. He could hear and see him; unless he tried to touch Steve seemed real enough. “I made everyone call me Bucky. Only our mothers called me James.”

“Exactly.” The hallucination was smirking at him. Steve always had loved to be right. “You don’t sound very convincing though. You’ve dreamed about me a hundred times. Do I ever call you anything else?”

“Not really.” Buck instead of Bucky, but never anything else. He had heard the name in casual conversation and gasped in the dark. “It still sounds strange.” It sounded better when Steve said it.

“You could be him again.” It was damned insistent. The Asset hadn’t even been consciously thinking about leaving, but apparently underneath the surface he’d been planning it all out.

“No, I couldn’t.” He wasn't who he used to be, it was too late for that. He could still be a person, though. “But I could pretend.” He looked into the mirror again. Bucky Barnes was as good a name as any. “My name is Bucky. The Winter Soldier is dead.”

* * *

****

Hiding within SHIELD, HYDRA had needed to hire out a certain amount of their dirty work. They’d had standing arrangements with more than one mercenary group and any one of them would have welcomed the Winter Soldier with open arms and supplied all the advanced weaponry he could ask for. Going to one of them would be almost as bad as waiting for someone to realize he hadn’t drowned in the Potomac.

He was still seeing Steve. It was happening more often. For a hallucination, he was pretty concerned with Bucky’s well-being. “What about SHIELD?”

“Come on, Steve. Just let me eat my sandwich, okay? Besides, there is no SHIELD anymore.” Bucky had watched clips of Maria Hill testifying before Congress. She’d described the destruction of the Triskelion with a detachment that the Asset would have found admirable and she had been absolutely adamant that SHIELD be completely dismantled. Natasha Romanoff had backed her up with her own testimony.

“Fine.” Steve picked up the half-eaten ham sandwich from the plate in front of him. Bucky had only made one sandwich but when he’d sat down to eat Steve was sitting across from him with a sandwich of his own, reminding Bucky he’d forgotten the mustard. “But you saw that post on the metahuman message board. A team claiming to be SHIELD agents saved that guy in Boise’s life and then offered him a job.”

“You can’t believe everything you read online, Steve.” It had to be fake. No one could be dumb enough to try and rebuild SHIELD. Hill had been Fury’s right hand woman and even she had moved on.

“One of the Level Eights escaped with a team and a mobile command center.” Steve had a point. There had been a frantic emergency message from what was left of John Garrett’s cell. Someone had disintegrated their boss with a ray gun or something ridiculous like that and half-killed his second in command with power tools. “It could be real. What if there is a SHIELD team still out there, still fighting the good fight?”

“And what do I tell them about you?” Steve was close enough to touch. If he’d been real, if they’d been sitting in their kitchen back in Brooklyn, he could have reached across the table and taken his hand, maybe stolen the pickle off his plate. He still could, but it was a bad idea. It hadn’t taken Bucky long to learn not to even try and touch him. He couldn’t fool himself quite that far, not yet.

“Maybe they can help you.”

It was pointless to keep arguing with Steve, especially when he was really arguing with himself. He finished his sandwich and washed the plate, cleaned out the fridge and threw away all the perishables except for the milk. He called the grocery store and cancelled his weekly delivery.

He packed the clothes that fit him best into a duffle bag and tucked in the copy of The Hobbit he’d been reading. Apparently, Tolkien had written a few more. Bucky would have to see if they were still in print.

He emptied the safe, cleaned and packed all his favorite weapons from the armory, and loaded everything into the generic grey sedan parked in the garage before he went to bed. In the morning, he would wipe down the apartment, get rid of all the fingerprints and then they’d leave. In the morning, they would start chasing ghosts.

* * *

_**Summer 1965** _

_A building was missing, the Asset was sure of it. There had once been an apartment building on that corner. On the fifth floor a woman used to have a flower box, and an old man had yelled every time they stepped on the squeaky stair._

_The Asset hadn't reported in after his mission in New Jersey, instead he'd been drawn to this place. He had been here before. He knew this place._

_A hand fell onto his shoulder and fingers dug into the joint painfully. "Come with me. I need you."_

_The man was blond and handsome. A blond man had told him that before. This man? It must have been this man. "You need me?"_

_"Of course." He led the Asset towards a car and then roughly shoved him inside. The man shoved a hard plastic device into the Asset’s chest and a sudden jolt of electricity coursed through his body. The world started to gray out. "Pull a stunt like this again and I will send you to Siberia."_

* * *

The dreams about Pierce were bad. The only consolation was waking up to Steve beside him. “I wish I could remember your last name. Then I could find you.”

“Why?” Steve was taking up half the bed, quite a feat considering he was imaginary. “What are you planning to do? Dig through public records, find my grave? You shouldn’t expose yourself like that.”

“I know.” Bucky rolled out of bed and grabbed his pants off the floor. “But not knowing what happened to you is making me crazy. I’m standing here having a conversation with thin air, Steve. I could use some closure.”

“You don’t need closure, Bucky, you need a software patch.” Steve rolled over onto his side, watching Bucky get dressed. “Hardware maintenance, too. Your arm is starting to malfunction and who knows what else is breaking down?”

“It’s only at 5% loss of motion.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots. “This Coulson guy isn’t exactly easy to find. They’re bouncing around the country. Every time I catch up they’ve moved on.”

“You’ll find them. Your gloves are on the nightstand.”

* * *

_**January 1943** _

_They had 72 hours in London and apparently, Bucky was going to spend all of them locked in this room. Their clothes were scattered between the door and the bed like something out of a movie and Bucky was in bed with Captain America._

_It was nothing like he was used to. Steve had always been in a hurry, like someone would catch them in their own apartment if they took too long, but the Captain kissed him with a slow certainty, no rush and no hesitation._

_Bucky ran a hand down the Captain’s back, then squeezed his ass. The man was all ripped muscle and smooth skin. Bucky had never gone in for that before. He’d spent years telling Steve that as long as he kept breathing Bucky liked his body just the way it and made him feel like a liar to be enjoying this so much._

_They’d been at it for a long time but when they finally stopped the Captain wasn’t out of breath, and Bucky reached up and touched his chest. He’d always been a fan of science but he hadn’t expected to get this kind of benefit out of it. “Get back down here. Haven’t you been teasing me long enough?”_

_“Maybe.” The Captain ran his hand down Bucky’s stomach. “I did promise to thank you for helping me get the men back to base safely. How do you want to collect?”_

_There were too many choices, but Bucky felt his eyes drawn back to the Captain’s mouth, to the lips he’d kissed red. He didn’t even have to say it out loud, the Captain just smiled at him and slid down the bed._

_He’d been on the front for a year with nothing but his right hand for company and he had to close his eyes when the Captain mouthed at the head of his dick. “Gonna be fast.”_

_He got a mumbled “S’fine.” and then Bucky’s eyes practically rolled back when the Captain started to suck him. Bucky’s hand scrambled and caught in his hair. He couldn’t stop his hips from snapping forward and strong hands pinned his hips to the bed. No one had ever really held him down before._

_The Captain swallowed, no gasping or gagging, and slowly pulled back. "Did I mention I can hold my breath for a really long time?"_

_"Show me again when that would matter. Get up here." Bucky felt sort of melted into the mattress. "Gimme a minute and I'll do you."_

_"You don't have to. I know I'm not exactly your type, Bucky-"_

_"Shut up." That relaxed feeling faded quick. "You think I don't want you? I'm here, ain't I?" He grabbed the Captain by his shoulders and pulled him down onto the bed. "Yeah, I miss that scrawny idiot but he's gone and you're here. What do you want from me?"_

_"This." One of the Captain's hands reached out and tipped Bucky's head up. Then they were kissing again and his weight bore Bucky down into the mattress._

* * *

Bucky sat up in bed panting. The dream had been as real and visceral as any of the times he’d dreamed of Steve. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a recovered memory, not if he didn’t want to doubt everything else he’d remembered.

Steve wasn’t lying next to him in bed. Bucky had gotten used to him being there first thing in the morning and the dream and its implications had left him unsettled. He needed to see Steve. A quick glance around the room found him. Their hotel room had a comfortable chair jammed between the desk and the window and Steve was curled up in it, drawing on the hotel stationery. “Maybe I’m not the man I thought I was, if I could do that to you.”

“You never promised me anything, Bucky.” Steve didn’t even look at him, just drank his coffee and drew. “I never let you promise me anything.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to.” Without any context in the dream, Bucky had no way of knowing how he’d gotten there. In the dream, it hadn't felt wrong, but during the war there had still been the chance of going home to Steve. "I shouldn't have done that to you."

“You didn't do anything to me, Bucky. I was dead.”

“No.” Bucky shook his head. “No, you were safe. I was sending you money home every month.”

“I know what you know, Bucky, and you knew you’d never see me again.” Steve set down his coffee mug. “Honestly, I don’t think I mind. You used to sleep with girls and I wasn’t mad. I used to make you tell me about it.”

“That’s different.” Steve had liked girls, even if none of them had been interested back, had liked hearing about what Bucky had gotten up to with them but there hadn’t been any other men. He couldn’t remember ever seriously wanting anyone else, not until the Captain.

“I knew you loved me. That’s what mattered.”

* * *

**June 2014**

When he finally managed to track the SHIELD team down, it was in a burning warehouse that was serving as a HYDRA secret base. Two of the SHIELD agents were taking cover from HYDRA fire.

Bucky slipped an earbud in. They weren’t transmitting over standard SHIELD frequencies, but whatever they were using didn’t turn out to be particularly secure either. The equipment he’d taken from the safe house decoded it pretty quickly. “—set off the explosion.”

A young voice, female and angry, responded. “We’re too close. There’s no way we’d survive at this distance.”

“We could do it anyway.” Another woman’s voice came on, calm and quiet despite her circumstances. “HYDRA won’t be able to come back from a loss this big easily.”

“No, that’s not acceptable.” The man’s voice had to be the Director. “Both of you are walking out of there. Trip, I need-”

Bucky had picked a nice perch for himself, set up his stand. The HYDRA snipers had set themselves up in similarly good positions. Bucky picked the one who had the best view of the agents and shot a neat hole through his forehead. He took down another four before anyone seemed to notice.

The Director cut himself off.There was a few seconds of silence over the radio before the Director asked, “Barton?” The hope and hesitation in that short sentence meant there was a story there, Bucky could tell.

“No, sorry.” Bucky couldn’t see any more rifles and no one was shooting at the agents anymore. “Agents on the ground, you’re clear. I’ll give you cover fire if you need it.”

He caught sight of the two women scurrying out of cover and the young one shouted, “We’re clear. Trip, blow it!”

The building blew up, but that wasn’t the impressive part. The shockwave itself was invisible, except for the effects it had on the surrounding buildings. Buildings crumpled, cars got thrown around like toys and then, just to make sure to cause maximum property damage, the air caught fire. The agents had to be crazy or desperate to set off a thermobaric explosion in a warehouse in a populated city.

When the fire burned itself out, the Director came back on the line. “Shooter, nice assist. We appreciate the help.”

“You’re welcome.” He ejected the clip from his rifle and started packing up his gear. “Consider this my job application. I heard you’re hiring.”

The younger woman’s voice again, “I told you we should have scrubbed that Reddit.”

“I think in this case things worked out. Shooter, come rendezvous with my people. They’re in the black van in the gas station parking lot.”

He found the van. Two of the agents were standing in front of it, one of the women and a man he assumed was Trip. A strange little robot was hovering between them. Both of them stared at him as if he had three heads. “Hi?”

The Director’s voice came back into his earpiece. “May, he’s-”

“I’ve known you for twenty years, Coulson. I think I know what Bucky Barnes looks like.” Her voice matched the calm one on the radio. Where was the other one? “And I met up with Maria. I know what the Winter Soldier looks like.”

Trip drew the gun from his holster and Bucky held his hands up in surrender. “I’m not the Winter Soldier anymore. I want to help you.”

“You can help us by coming along quietly.” The woman reached behind her into the van and pulled out a set of handcuffs.

Handcuffs didn’t have a chance of holding him, but if it made her feel better, that was fine. “Do what you need to do.”

She snapped the cuffs around his wrist and Bucky immediately regretted it. They weren’t normal cuffs, he could tell the moment he tested the chain.

The woman stepped back, glancing over Bucky’s shoulder. “It’s under control.”

Someone pressed the muzzle of their gun against the back of Bucky’s head. “He’s HYDRA?” Well, at least he’d found the other agent.

If they wanted a second gun on him, he could go along with it, but he wasn’t going to let her call him a Nazi. “I’m not with fucking HYDRA. They were controlling me.”

“Mind control.” The woman laughed, a real fully bodied laugh, her gun shifting against his head a little. Clearly she didn’t believe him and Bucky could admit it sounded far-fetched. “I bet Ward wishes he’d thought of that one.”

“Skye, we have precedent for this.” The Director’s voice on the coms sounded nervous. Bucky had to agree. He could maybe overpower her before she blew him away, but that would open him up to the other two agents.

“We’re too exposed here.” May glanced around. The lot was empty, but she was right, they could be interrupted any second.

Why had he listened to Steve? His brilliant plans always ended up with someone bleeding on the ground. “Look, I know-”

Skye pulled the trigger and the world stopped.


	3. SHIELD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I used to be good at getting women to like me, right?”

_**Winter of 1940** _  
  
_“I’m fine.”_

_“Sure you are.” He helped Steve over the rim of the bathtub. “Take a few breaths without wheezing, then we’ll talk.”_

_“Jerk.” Steve slid down into the warm water until it came up to his neck. “You don’t have to stay home with me. Really.”_

_“I leave you now, you’re going to drown in this tub.” Bucky dropped to the floor beside the tub. “You wanna do that to me? Have me come home in the middle of the night and find your body?”_

_“I’m not going to drown.”_

_“Right. Because I’m going to sit right here with you until your lungs remember how to work.” He’d grabbed Weird Tales off the kitchen table when they’d stumbled their way into the bathroom and opened it up to Steve’s bookmark. “‘It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.’” Bucky looked up over the edge of the book. “You trying to tell me something, Steve?”_

_Only Steve’s face was visible above the water now. “Just read.”_

* * *

Waking up from his memories of Steve always hurt, but it was worse this time. He wasn’t in bed with Steve’s ghost, he was strapped into a chair. Steve was crouched next to him. “I’m sorry. This was such a bad idea, Bucky, I’m so sorry.”

Bucky didn’t answer. What could he say, even if they were alone? They’d picked wrong. They were going to wipe him, bring back the Winter Soldier. He could already feel the ice crystals forming in his bones. He'd never been given a cyanide capsule, maybe they'd been afraid he'd off himself at the first flicker of memory, and he couldn't get to his hold-out pistol. He tested the straps.

Trip was talking to a woman in a lab coat. “Can you blame her? If it was me, it would have been a bullet not a dendrotoxin.”

“Her icer was calibrated for a Centipede soldier, if he hadn’t been enhanced he’d be dead. It was pure luck she didn’t overdose him. Coulson wanted her to wait and she shot him anyway.” The scientist glanced at the monitor. “Our guest is awake.”

“So she isn’t always so trigger-happy?” Bucky found himself sitting very still and Steve started to whisper soothing things. He was terrified of the scientist and trying not to let it show. How much had they broken him that he was more afraid of a good looking woman in a lab coat than a man holding a pistol?

Bucky was stronger than any ordinary human and the straps, as solid as they seemed, weren’t designed for a super soldier. If they interrogated him long enough, Bucky might be able to escape. If he got his arm free and took the scientist hostage.... It was a long shot, but it was possible.

“It’s been a trying few months. We’ve all been changed by them.” She flipped a switch and the machine hummed to life. No, she wasn’t going to interrogate him, she was going right to the big guns. “We’re ready when you are, Trip.”

He braced himself for the mouth guard, the electricity. Instead, Trip dragged a chair over and sat just out of where he could reach if he got an arm free. “If you’re really Bucky Barnes, I’m sorry and I’m in for a rough ride at Thanksgiving. We need to ask you some questions.”

He didn’t have a knife, or pliers. Bucky had survived Zola and his table the first time, hadn’t broken, hadn’t told him anything, but that had been a long time ago and he couldn't remember how it had ended. The Captain, maybe? Even if that was what had happened, no one was coming this time. “I’d rather die than be him again. Wiping me isn’t enough, Pierce proved that. Just kill me now, save us all a lot of time.”

“No one is killing or mind wiping anyone!” The scientist was staring at the monitor, her brows furrowed. “Just... state your name.”

She wasn’t drilling into him or anything and they already knew his name so it was a strange place to start. The question seemed harmless enough. “James Buchanan Barnes. I made everyone called me Bucky, though.”

Trip glanced back at her and she nodded. “Alright. Prove it. Tell me a story from the war, convince me you’re Bucky Barnes.”

Bucky had no idea what to tell them. He remembered Steve better than anything else. Somehow he didn’t think these people wanted to hear about his secret romance with his best friend. He could think of one thing they might be able to verify. “Captain America snores.”

“I’m sorry?” The scientist was gawking at him.

“He snored when he slept wrong. Cap was supposed to be perfect. It made Stark crazy, it made everyone crazy.” The guys would have felt sorry for him, having to share a tent with that noise, if the warmth Steve put off hadn’t made it worth that small annoyance. He’d heard some griping about that, guys who’d have been glad to put out if it meant they’d get to be warm, even if they had to sleep with that racket. He’d figured out a fix eventually. The trick was to get Cap to sleep on his side, Bucky curled up at his back.

That had worked fine, until Bucky pulled a late watch. “One night, he must have rolled onto his back because it was dead silent and all of a sudden Cap’s sawing wood. He brought a German patrol down on us. The whole camp went crazy and after a minute Cap burst out of his tent, down to his skivvies, like something out of Hitler’s wet dreams. The Germans were so shocked they stopped shooting and he did that ricochet thing, took them all out with one throw of the shield.”

The scientist had her hands clapped over her mouth, like she was about to start laughing. Trip just looked uncomfortable. “I’ve heard that one.”

“I’m sorry if we’ve ruined your holiday plans, Trip.” She really did sound sorry.

“It’s fine. You can make it up to me.” Were they flirting, right in front of him? What kind of operation was this? “Alright, let’s get down to the heart of this, Barnes. Are you a HYDRA agent?”

“Not anymore and never by choice.”

* * *

They kept him in the chair for two hours. After they exhausted his sketchy memories, the questions got downright weird. What did a tortoise on its back have to do with him being a double agent?

“What’s wrong with a calf-skin wallet?” Bucky felt like he was missing something here. “What else would you make a leather wallet out of?”

“You can stop now, Simmons.” The door opened and a bland-looking man in a suit came in. “Mister Barnes, I’m Director Coulson. We’ve exhausted our collective Bucky Barnes trivia, which considering the source,” he gestured between himself and Trip, “was considerable. You’re not lying to us and your reactions seem human enough, so I only have one more question.”

They already knew everything he could tell them about HYDRA, about who he’d been before Zola. “What else do you need to know?”

“You could have gone to New York and joined the Avengers. Stark would have let you right in the front door, if it meant he got to look at your cybernetics.” Coulson had gotten closer than Trip had been willing to, he was leaning over Bucky. “So the question is, why us? We’re not exactly the top of the heap as far as spy agencies go.”

“I don’t want to be an Avenger and I’ve already lived with one Stark. They’re bad housemates.” Really though, Bucky didn’t think he could have lived with Steve’s ghost and Captain America in the same building, not if he wanted to retain what was left of his sanity. “I could have gone to one of the AIM offshoots, they would have found a spot for the man who’d been the Winter Soldier. I came here because I didn’t want to be their weapon. You’re still fighting for what SHIELD was supposed to believe in.”

A voice came over the coms. “He’s holding something back.”

Damn. How sensitive was whatever they had him hooked up to? Bucky exhaled and caught a glimpse of Steve, standing behind the panel, giving him a thumbs up. Steve was an eternal optimist, Bucky still wasn’t sure he was getting out of this alive. “You’re the underdogs and you’re on HYDRA’s shitlist. It’s what Steve would have done.”

Coulson took a step back and glanced up at the camera. “Satisfied?”

* * *

Agent Koenig had given him a lanyard and locked him in a tiny efficiency apartment. The first thing he did was shower. When they had iced him, he'd apparently landed in a puddle of stale beer mixed with gasoline.

While he toweled off, he tried to think up a strategy for working with these people. No one trusted him. That was good, at least at first. He would need to earn their trust, but Bucky wasn’t sure where to start. Trip, who had grown up on stories about the Commandos? The Director, who was apparently some kind of expert? Bucky got the impression the rest of the team would be tougher. “I used to be good at getting women to like me, right?”

“They liked your face. That’s not going to get you real far in this crowd.” Steve sprawled out beside him on the bed, bigger than the one they’d shared in Brooklyn, even if it was only a full size if Bucky was feeling generous. It was good Steve didn’t take up much space, unless he was feeling cat-like. “I would start with May.”

“That’s because you like them a little mean.” It wasn’t a bad idea, though. May had the look of a soldier, someone who had seen and done things she wasn’t proud of.

“But you won’t. You’ll ask Simmons to look at your arm.”

“No.” He was suddenly freezing, even though he knew rationally the room hadn’t changed temperature.

“You are lying here talking to a dead man, Bucky.” He hated when Steve brought that up. He knew, okay? He wasn’t going to forget. “Your memory is full of holes, and you haven’t had any maintenance in months. You need her.”

“I can’t.” Just the sight of her in that lab coat made him feel like running. He’d been on the table too many times to ever trust a scientist.

“She lost someone too.” Simmons had stopped more than once during the interrogation, like she was expecting someone other than Trip to finish her thought or interrupt her. “She could help you. Isn’t that why we came here?”

“Obviously I didn’t think it through.” Bucky wasn’t even sure what help meant anymore. “You’re all I’ve got. What if I stop seeing you?”

Steve set his hand on top of Bucky’s. His touch was still ghostly, no warmth or sensory input. “You’re not really seeing me now, Bucky.”

“Screw you, Steve.” Bucky said it even though he knew Steve was right. He was always right. Damn it. 

* * *

When Koenig let him out the next morning, he went for a walk looking for Simmons' lab. He wanted to get a look at the place before he approached her, and it was early enough he didn't expect anyone else to be awake. He was out of luck, Simmons was already deeply involved in whatever she was working on at her desk. She was also talking to herself. “Knowing what it did to Garrett, even if I could make more, which I can’t, I probably shouldn’t. You’re in enough- Agent Barnes!” She seemed startled when he knocked. He kept forgetting how quietly he cmoved. He should have made more noise. “What can I do for you?”

He caught a glimpse of Steve behind her, reading over her shoulder with a puzzled expression. Science had never been his best subject. Simmons, of course, couldn't see him. “I’ve been having some trouble with my prosthetic. I’ve lost some range of motion and the shoulder joint feels wrong.”

She hmmed and stared at his shoulder. “I’m a biologist. What you really need is an engineer but…” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Maybe he wasn’t broken, maybe it was just human nature to be haunted by the people you’d lost. “Let me take some readings.”

She put him on a cold metal table and Bucky tried to stay calm, to keep his breath steady. It was such bullshit, he didn’t know how Steve had put up with his endless talk about even breaths for so many years. The room had stainless steel fixtures and white walls and was a few degrees colder than the rest of the base. He wondered if she did autopsies on this table.

“Do you know how extensive your modifications are?”

“No.” His voice sounded strained. Maybe she wouldn’t notice. Bucky clutched the edge of the table. He wasn’t sure he could do this.

“Your heart rate is quite high and respiration is becoming erratic. Are you-” Simmons was suddenly looming over him and Bucky detachedly noted a strange crunching noise. “No, you’re obviously not all right.”

“None of this-” He could see the scan results begin to populate her holoscreen. His whole left side, from the shoulder down to the ribs, was metal. “Was my idea. And I was awake for parts of it.”

She inhaled sharply. “I think I have enough readings. Go ahead and sit up.” She turned off all the scanners. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“You didn’t know.” The crunching noise had apparently been his hand crushing the edge of the table. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not.” She opened up a cabinet and took out a mug full of lollipops. “I knew I made you nervous. You of all people must know what a scientist is capable of, when they let go.”

The lollipop was such a strange gesture, Bucky had no choice except to pluck one from the mug and peel off the wrapper. “How badly damaged am I?”

“I see considerable damage to your hippocampus. You’ve been through a great deal of trauma. The fact that you and Captain America survived being frozen at all is a testament to the serum’s healing factor. Cryogenics doesn’t work on normal humans.” She leaned against the cabinet, far enough away that he could relax a little. “What I find odd is that nothing was done to mitigate it. If I was going to freeze you I would… Not that I would ever freeze you! But they could have made it easier on you, physically, at least. That you remember anything is remarkable.”

He ran human fingers over the seam where metal met flesh. “I only knew what they put in. That’s the way they liked it.”

“That’s despicable.” She put the candy away, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Other than that, the only problem is your shoulder. It's inflamed and swollen where the prosthetic hooks in.”

Bucky got the sense Simmons was hedging. He could only think of one thing so upsetting she’d hesitate. “You want to take off my arm.”

“I believe we have to. Does it hurt?”

“No.” Nothing really hurt, not like he remembered pain being before he fell. “It’s numb and it’s less responsive.” Bucky didn’t know how to take it off. He would have to let her do it, let her touch him. The thought made his skin crawl.

“You could have nerve damage. Are you supposed to be wearing it all the time like this?”

“They never let me up for more than week at a time.” They must have performed maintenance on him that he couldn’t remember. There would be logs, in his manual. “I have the maintenance manual.” He still hadn’t managed to read it. He kept throwing up. It was worse than the first time, he understood his reaction now. “Can you read it?”

“Of course we’ll-” She trailed off again, turned away and wiped at her eyes. “I’d be happy to help in any way I can.” 

* * *

The worst part about being wary of her was that as far as Bucky could tell, Simmons seemed to be a nice person. That didn’t make her any easier to be around. “I’ve read through the maintenance procedure. Whenever you’re ready, we can remove your arm. I’ll clean and calibrate it overnight while you heal.”

She’d come up with a quick, easy way to help him. It made his heart beat faster, his chest tighten. “How often would we have to do this?”

“Daily would be ideal,” No. No, he couldn’t do that. “Unless you’re making heavy use of it, weekly should suffice. I’ll walk you through it.” She threw a diagram up on the holotable. “A panel near your shoulder is-”

“I don’t need details.” His chest already felt tight. “How much is it going to hurt?”

“Not at all.” She gave him what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile. “I can give you a local. Well, an incredibly high dose of a local. Figuring out the dosage was quite challenging, but you shouldn’t feel a thing. We can start whenever you’re rea-”

“Let’s get this over with.” Bucky pulled his shirt off over his head. If he waited, he might lose his nerve.

She stared at his chest for a few seconds too long and from behind him, he heard Steve’s laugh. “I think she likes you, Bucky.”

Bucky smiled at her, just to see what would happen. Her response was to jab him in the shoulder with a needle. He jerked, but he didn’t accidentally grab her or anything so he was just going to put that in the win column. “Your reputation precedes you, Agent Barnes. Your legendary smile and the phrase ‘lady’s man’ comes up quite frequently.”

“I’m not the one staring at your naked chest.” What sort of stories had the guys been telling about him, anyway? “You can’t believe everything Dum Dum said about me when I wasn’t there to defend myself.”

The access panel popped free and Simmons reached for a screwdriver. His good mood evaporated. “Don’t look. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

As Simmons began to disconnect his arm, Bucky squeezed his eyes shut. He could feel something shifting. “What are you doing?”

“Disconnecting the servos from your shoulder socket.” He was pretty sure she squeezed his shoulder, but he was too numb to be sure. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t design the thing.” It was taking everything he had not to bodily stop her from touching him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” She gave something a tug and he lost feeling in one finger.

“Who were you talking to when I came in?” She froze. That had been the wrong question, he knew it right away. They weren’t going to be commiserating about whoever it was she was missing. “Never mind, forget I said anything.”

“Thank you.” She went back to work her hands a little less steady. “I can’t, I’m sorry.”

“I lost someone, before HYDRA took me.” He didn’t have a full name and it had been so long ago. “I can’t even find out what happened to them.”

“Well, you have us now.” She gave his arm a twist. A loud a popping noise was followed by the complete loss of feeling in his arm as it came loose in her hand. He felt strange without the arm, lopsided and vulnerable. Simmons laid it down on the table, gently. “And the Captain, of course. He’s out hunting HYDRA, we’re bound to run into him sooner or later.”

“Guess so.” Bucky knew he should ask her more about his brain, about what his chances were to get all his memories back, but the thought of having to face Captain America distracted him. Bucky wasn’t ready for that, he'd been actively avoiding any information about the man since he'd had the dream about the hotel room.

Simmons gave him a juice box. "I'm sure that was at least as traumatic as donating blood. Drink that before you stand up."

It tasted too sweet. Almost everything did, even milk, so he drank it anyway. She was right, being terrified burned up a lot of energy.

When she let him leave he just wanted to sleep. Instead, he had to listen to Steve talk about Captain America. “I don't know what your problem is, Buck. The man is obviously crazy about you. He was willing to die rather than kill you.”

“I'm glad he meets your exacting standards for your replacement, but that just means I have a type.” He punched in his door code and sat down at the kitchen table to try and unlace his boots one handed. It didn’t go particularly well, he’d double knotted them out of habit. “Apparently, I like them stupid brave with no sense of self-preservation.”

“He’s still here, I’m gone. You were drawn to him, you dream about him. Don’t you want to know why?” Steve sat down across the table, that stubborn look on his face. “I wouldn’t want you pining for me. You knew it then and you know it now.”

If he’d had something softer than a boot, he might have pitched it at Steve, even though it would have just passed through him and hit the wall. “Just, shut up, okay?” He’d deal with Captain America later, today had been traumatic enough.

* * *

_**June 1, 1983** _

_“Ana.”_

_The girl froze, still crouched down locking her bike. “No.”_

_The Asset was not wearing body armor, it would have drawn unwanted attention. Threat assessment indicated the target would possess only small arms or knives. At the moment, she was completely unarmed so the Asset moved in closer. “You will return with me, Ana.”_

_“No. I won’t. I won’t go back.” She was clutching her pack. It was likely she had a weapon inside. Her handlers had waited until she had received the serum and survived the change before stealing her. By then, she’d received four years of intense combat training. That was why the Asset had been sent, she was too dangerous to trust the job to a lesser tool. “Please. Just leave us alone.”_

_“My mission requires me to retrieve you.” The Asset had been given a single piece of leverage to use on the girl, to make her come along quietly. “If you come with me, your handlers won’t be harmed.”_

_Ana was looking past the Asset, at the people going about their daily shopping. “And if I don’t? If I scream that you’re hurting me and people come running?”_

_“My instructions are to leave you here, go to your apartment building, and terminate your handlers.” It was unusually generous of the Red Room to offer such terms. The Asset had sought clarification twice before he’d been able to understand they truly intended to spare the traitors if the girl came along willingly._

_She shook her head, obviously not believing him. “You expect me to believe you would leave my parents alone, if I came back?”_

_“If you agree to come with me, my instructions are to transport you to the Louisville International Airport. Your handlers are not part of that mission directive.”_

_“I won’t let you hurt them.” She’d drawn a knife from a wrist sheath. That was a good sign. Her training hadn’t been allowed to go completely fallow for the past three years. “They saved me, and I love them.”_

_“That will be corrected.” The Asset grabbed her wrist and squeezed until he heard the bone break. “Come with me, now, or I will proceed with the alternate mission parameters.”_

_Ana gave a cry of pain and her eyes welled with tears. “You really won’t hurt them?”_

_The Asset didn’t answer her. He didn’t understand that instruction himself. His handler had given up explaining and simply told him, “If you kill them, their suffering is over. If we take the girl and leave them untouched their suffering will last a lifetime.”_

* * *

When he went to breakfast in the Playground’s mess the next morning, he found Simmons staring at the industrial toaster like it had all the answers and Coulson drinking coffee at the long table.

“Agent Barnes.” Coulson looked pleased with himself to say it. Bucky remembered the detailed questions Trip had asked and wondered how much of it was whatever stories he'd heard and how much of it was Coulson. “You look different this morning.”

Oh, he thought he was funny. Bucky disagreed. “I shaved.” The Playground had minimal support staff and no cook at all, every meal was fend for yourself. That was fine. He dropped a pat of butter onto the grill and cracked a couple eggs one handed. It was a good thing he still had the knack, it would have been awkward if he’d smashed the shell.

Simmons’ bagel dropped down into the tray with a thunk. She looked vaguely disappointed and sent it through a second time. “Good morning.”

“Morning.” She was less horrifying when she was half-asleep, that was good. “You want an egg?”

“No, thank you.” She seemed to find the second toasting acceptable and aggressively scraped it with butter then sat down in the seat across from Coulson. “How are you feeling?”

“You mean besides the brain damage?” Coulson choked a little on his coffee while Bucky cheerfully plated his eggs. The guy was just a little creepy. “The shoulder is fine. I can feel it again, at least.”

A spot of coffee from Coulson’s coughing fit had landed in front of Simmons’ seat and she dabbed at it with a napkin. “I never said brain damage. You’re just a bit… freezer burnt. Which, admittedly, may sound like brain damage, but it's not the same.”

“If we were going to add a cybernetically enhanced killing machine to the team, I’d rather have Mike.” Skye had come into the mess and was filling a giant mug with coffee. She was walking funny, like she’d been hurt. “At least we know what’s wrong with him.”

Bucky hadn’t expected her to be hostile, despite the headshot. Wasn’t she their tech expert? Shouldn’t she be impressed by his augmentations, his reinforced skeleton?

“Skye.” Coulson was watching her carefully. Maybe he saw what Bucky saw, the slight limp. Maybe he was surprised at her reaction.

“Shutting up now.” She sat down on Simmons' other side, as far away as she could get from him without sitting at another table. “I need a coffee machine for my room. Do you know how early May starts training?”

“You don’t have to do that.” Coulson slid the sugar bowl across the table.

“No, I do.” She poured an obscene amount of sugar into her coffee, even considering the size of the cup. “You guys enjoy your breakfast. I’ll see you later.”

Coulson waited until she was out of earshot to ask Simmons, “Is she okay?”

Simmons, not quite meeting his eyes, dragged a finger across a gouge in the tabletop. “She’s fine.”

Wow, she was a terrible liar. Bucky finished his eggs and went to wash his plate. 

* * *

He made an egg sandwich and wrapped it in foil before he went looking for Skye. All his espionage training was old, the Winter Soldier wasn’t that kind of tool, but human nature couldn’t have changed that much. Saving her life had been an in, he couldn’t waste it.

Koenig pointed him toward the server room where Skye worked. He knocked and when she didn’t answer, he started talking. “You seem smart. Cautious, too. The things I did, considering the people I killed, it’s smart not to trust me right awayI need to know what I can do long-term.”

The door opened. “There isn’t anything.” She held out her hand though, for the food. “As far as I’m concerned, Bucky Barnes died a long time ago. I saw his name at the Hub, on the wall of our dead. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not him and I have no reason to trust you.”

“I saved your life.” That should have counted for something. It was hard not to trust someone who helped you out of a terrible situation. That was why good cop/bad cop worked if you believed the television programs he’d seen.

“That doesn’t go as far with this group as you’d expect.” She peeled back the foil to find sausage, egg, and cheese on a kaiser roll. “Neither does seduction, if you were going to try that next.”

“You’re not my type.” It wasn’t exactly true, he’d never been too choosey about the women in his life. He’d always known none of them were in it for the long haul.

“What is your type?” Why was she eating the food if she didn’t trust him?

He would have to give a little. “Skinny asthmatics with hero complexes.”

Skye raised an eyebrow as she chewed. “Interesting to know. It’s still not enough.”

“You ate the food. I can’t be that dangerous.” She opened the door up a little more. The security feeds were streaming on one of the holoprojectors. She’d been watching him. He needed to rethink his approach here. “Enjoy your sandwich.”

* * *

Bucky wasn’t even sure where to start with Skye so for the time being, he moved on.

Agent Melinda May, aka the Cavalry, had been in the HYDRA database. That alone was enough to tell Bucky she was a serious threat. She was a Level Seven and dangerous as hell, but significantly less scary to Bucky than Simmons was.

She had an office and he found her surrounded by holo-screens and stacks of hard files. “Your file says Coulson pulled you off a desk and you’re just here to pilot the plane. You don’t move like any analyst I’ve ever seen.”  
  
“That’s part of the job.” She seemed less wary than Skye, but it was probably confidence in her own abilities and not trust in him.

“When I was waking up, the Winter Soldier monitored the HYDRA emergency channel for a month and a half after DC.” He set down a flash drive and a notepad. “It’s all here, everything I can remember.”

She flipped through the pages and palmed the thumb drive. “I’m not in charge here. You should have taken this to Coulson.”

“He’s the Director, you’re his right hand. I think we both know that field operations are your show.” She’d been ready to blow the building and die rather than let HYDRA keep that base and she’d been ready to make that decision for Skye as well. “I thought you should have it.”  
\---  
Trip turned out to be the easiest. They went jogging through the empty corridors and he didn't expect Bucky to talk much. When they were done, he grabbed two water bottles and held one out to Bucky. “You’re not the first guy I know that got mind-controlled into doing bad shit or even the second. I saw Barton after New York, the guy was a mess. Ever since Thor fell out of the sky, the whole world’s gone screwy.”

Barton again. He wasn’t on base although Bucky had seen the name in passing in HYDRA’s files. "Glad it’s not just me. The Nazis were really into that Norse god crap. It’s hard to believe he’s really Thor. " When he reached for the bottle, Trip grabbed his wrist.

“You turn out to be a traitor, you looking like Bucky Barnes isn’t going to save you. Just saying.” He let go, cracked open his own bottle like that hadn’t been a threat. "He’s really Thor and it’s a big deal. There's been a huge uptick in neo-paganism since New York. Lotta people walking around wearing hammers like crosses."

"Okay. Good to know." That little tidbit hadn’t been in SHIELD’s files. In fact, Trip was a fountain of facts not in the files. How the hell did you know all those stories about the Commandos?"

"Gabriel Jones was my grandfather." Trip said it quietly, like it wasn't something he wanted getting around. "He and Grandma liked to talk about Cap, keep his memory alive. I grew up in SHIELD. My cousins and I used to play in Grandma's office, on this big rug of the seal."

"Your grandmother was SHIELD, too?" Bucky winced. Trip wasn't kidding about Thanksgiving being awkward.

"She was Director for a decade so I hope so." Trip threw his empty water bottle into a recycle bin. "You knew her. Peggy Carter."

Bucky wondered how the Captain had taken that news. He'd mooned over her all the time, not all of it could have been fake. Still, it gave Bucky an in to ask a favor. “Hey Trip? If I turn back into him, you have my permission to put me down.” It was always good to have a contingency plan.

* * *

At the end of his first week at the Playground, Koenig stopped locking him in at night. That was a major plus since Bucky had problems sleeping and the TV reception here was shitty. It was nice to be able to wander the halls at night. He was surprised to see Coulson in an out of the way corridor very late one night. He was writing on the walls. “Coulson?”

Coulson didn’t answer. He was intently focused on whatever it was he was doing. Bucky realized he wasn’t drawing, he was carving into the wall with a knife.

"Move along, Barnes." May was set up with a camera a bit further down the hall.

“Are you okay?” Still no answer. Bucky didn’t know what to do, it was like Coulson was in a trance.

"I said **move**. This is none of your business, just walk away."

He could take down May, maybe, but it would mean leaving the base immediately and giving up the chance to use their resources to fight HYDRA. May was dangerous and Coulson didn't look injured, just far away. Bucky wasn't like Steve, he didn't always do the right thing. He walked away. 


	4. The Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It was that simple for you?"

**_May 1941_ **

_"That was some hit from Pete Reiser.” Steve was stripped down to his underwear, sprawled out in a patch of sunlight on their bedroom floor, sketch pad open in front of him. Steve had a smudge of charcoal across his forehead Bucky wasn’t mentioning._

_“They’re going to win the world series this year, I’m calling it now.” It had been almost forty years, it was bound to happen sooner or later._

_“I’ll believe it when I see it.” A pencil outline of Ebbets Field was taking up most of the page. “You gonna come down here or just stand up there and stare at my ass?”_

_“View’s pretty good from here, but yeah, think I'll join you.” Bucky turned on the radio before he dropped down to stretch out beside Steve. He threw an arm across Steve’s back and kissed the back of his neck. “You’ll see, the Dodgers will get there this year. We’ll go again closer to your birthday.”_

_Steve dropped his pencil, pushed the sketchbook away. There was a look in his eyes that always meant he was about to start trouble. “Care to make a wager?”_

_“I dunno, Stevie. You’re a pretty sore loser. Who knows what you might-” Steve fought dirty, even when it was just the two of them. He was good at using whatever advantage he could get and he hooked his fingers through Bucky’s belt loops and yanked as they rolled. Bucky was over on his back before he knew what was happening. “Okay, okay. What are the stakes?”_

_From his position astride Bucky’s hips, Steve grinned and Bucky found himself smiling back. “I’m sure we can think of something.”_

* * *

July 2014

He’d made the right call with May. It only took her a couple weeks to comb through the information he’d given her and call a meeting. They all sat in the dark, the only light in the room coming from the holotable. “If Barnes’ information is correct, after the Triskelion fell, HYDRA cells stayed in contact with each other via a secure satellite uplink. They’ve all gone dark, for now, but I think we all know they’re just regrouping.”  
  
“The protocols call for a six month period of silence. After that, the cells will wake up and link back up. They’ll start recruiting.” By force if necessary. Bucky knew that better than anyone. The sudden taste of rubber flooded his senses and he had to force his attention back to the present. “They’ll start in your fringe groups. No one will even hear the word HYDRA for months. Maybe they’ll help secure some weapons, fake some papers. By the time they realize what’s going on it’s too late, and HYDRA has another head.”  
  
“We’re past the three month mark from DC.” Trip’s voice came out of the dark from somewhere to his right. “You’re saying in a few months every dot on this map is going to be an active HYDRA cell?”  
  
“Some of them will already be dead. The world governments are hunting them down, too. We lucked out.” May had a strange definition of luck. ”Even if just half these groups survived, we’re still looking at dozens of cells.”  
  
“Do we know who’s leading them?” Coulson sat at the head of the table. The blue light of the table illuminated him and not for the first time in the past three days Bucky wondered what was wrong with him.  
  
“They don’t need a leader.” Skye had once been something very close to a terrorist, as far as Bucky had been able to piece together. “Not at first. All they need to do is make a lot of trouble while their best and brightest do like Pierce did and infiltrate a government agency. The Secret Service, maybe, this time. Ten or twenty years from now, we can do this all over again, but it will be cyberpunk.”  
  
“Let’s not.” Coulson seemed sharp enough right now. You’d never know he wandered the halls at night in a daze. “Assume I don’t want to fight HYDRA in my seventies. What can we do about this now?”  
  
“I can probably hack into their secure channel, back track the signal to the source." Skye already had her phone out, tapping something onto the screen. "We should start now, hit as many of them as we can while they're isolating themselves. Once they wake up and start talking they're going to come gunning for us."  
  
Coulson didn't answer. When Bucky glanced over, he was staring at the map. His eyes were unfocused, and there were strange symbols cut into the table in front of him. May covered for him immediately, Bucky wasn't sure anyone else noticed. "Skye, give me a tech assessment. Put the softest target on the bottom of the list, we don't want to walk into a trap on day one." She flicked the lights on and Coulson came back to himself, blinking. "Barnes, you're with me. I want to know everything you know about these bases and their personnel. Trip, brief Simmons and start putting together an insertion plan. We're working without a net, we need to be careful. No more mistakes like the warehouse."  
  
When the meeting broke up, he jogged after Trip. "Where is Simmons?" He needed another maintenance session and if he put it off he might lose his nerve.  
  
"Working. She's a busy lady."  
  
Not too busy to have been creeping out of Trip's rooms at five am. Maybe that was supposed to be a secret. He wandered down to her lab, his stomach churning. Maybe she would give him another lollipop.  
  
She was talking to herself again. "I could really use your help, you know. I don't see why you think you can just lie about all day while the rest of us are fighting HYDRA and rebuilding SHIELD." Her tool kit was all laid out on a table. Apparently she'd been expecting him. "Barnes. How was the meeting?"  
  
"It was fine." He rolled a stool up to her work bench. "Trip said you were busy."  
  
"Yes." Simmons picked up the screwdriver. It had someone’s initials carved onto the handle, not hers. The team had a person sized hole in its skillset and it was shaped like an engineer. "I'm consulting on a difficult medical case."  
  
He had wondered who she'd lost. It was obvious now. Something terrible had happened, even if they hadn't died. "My friend Steve was sick a lot. It's tough."  
  
"Oh." That seemed to peak her interest. She gave him the numbing shot and got started removing the screws. "Skye said... well, there's always been speculation of course. I've read the letter, of course, in undergrad. It was-"  
  
"Why would you read one of my letters?" Howard should have burned all of it. He didn't want to think about someone like Coulson reading the letters he'd written Steve and calling it a hobby.  
  
"In my professor's defense, it was widely published and you’d been presumed dead for several decades." The conversation was actually distracting him from her work with the servos, even if it was causing a different kind of distress. "I was wondering if you'd be willing to tell me how one goes about starting a relationship with their best friend."  
  
The question was impersonal with a strange hint of scientific interest, like when she asked about his metabolism and workout routine. "Whiskey?"  
  
"Oh." She seemed disappointed. "It was that simple for you?"  
  
"It was the thirties." Simple wasn't the word he would have used. Terrifying, maybe.  
  
"No, of course, I didn't mean..." One of the servos was stuck and Simmons grabbed a pair of pliers. He couldn’t feel anything, but the instrument still made him clench his teeth in anticipation of pain. "I should put some WD-40 on this."  
  
"Simmons, did you-"  
  
"You asked me who I lost. His name is Fitz." The noise his arm made when she disconnected it was sickeningly close to the sound of Captain America dislocating his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

 

  
  
"I might puke on your floor." The thought of someone else, maybe thousands of someone elses, reading their letters wasn't helping. Jesus, which one had she read?

"Let's not." She tugged him down to the floor. "Head between your knees."  
  
"Distract me. Tell me about Fitz." The concrete floor beneath him was cool and he focused on that.  
  
"HYDRA tried to kill us. He sacrificed himself to save me. I pulled him out, but it wasn't...." He could hear water running. "He's not dead. It's worse." A cool washcloth pressed against the back of his neck.  
  
"You're talking to the poster boy for worse than dead." The cool washcloth felt good, it gave him something to think about besides the churning of his stomach.  
  
"He's in a coma. I would do anything to get him back." She sat beside him on the bare floor. "I know life doesn't work like that. This isn't a movie, I'm not going to get up one morning and love him the way he wants me to."  
  
"It wouldn't be any less trouble in the long run." He gave Simmons a side-eyed glance. "My room is next to Trip's."  
  
"Yes, well, I'm sure you'll agree that life has been somewhat terrifying lately. It's nice to have something to distract me." She was very resolutely not looking at Bucky.  
  
He was glad for the thick concrete walls. From the hint of pink on her cheeks, Bucky got the impression Trip was a considerable distraction. "I'm alright now. Sorry."  
  
"I was hoping this would get easier for you." She got to her feet and held out a hand. "I'll get quicker."

* * *

__**December 17th 1991  
**   
_The Target was still alive when the Asset made it down the cliffside to where the car had come to rest. The secondary target had died on impact, all the the Asset needed to do was wait for the primary target to expire._   
  
_"I want Steve. Or Edwin." The Asset visually confirmed that the Target was fatally wounded. It wouldn't be long. "Can you look like one of them instead?"_   
  
_"No." He didn't understand the question._   
  
_"Some angel of death you are." The Target fumbled with his seatbelt, as if that was what had him pinned. "I saw you in the road and swerved. We went over the side."_   
  
_"That was anticipated."_   
  
_The Target finally got his seatbelt undone. It was pointless, the steering wheel was crushing his chest. He wasn't going anywhere. "My wife?"_   
  
_"Dead."_   
  
_"You're not an angel, are you?" The Target coughed. Little flecks of blood settled on the shattered windshield. "HYDRA. You're HYDRA. I dug too deep."_   
  
_The contract for the hit on the Target had come from a rival company, but HYDRA had accepted it for their own interests. The Asset hadn't been given details, it wasn't necessary for such a simple mission._   
  
_"The day I had him arrested, Anton spat in my face and called me a Nazi. I looked for him, when I started to piece it together. Couldn't find him. Can't find anyone." The Target suddenly grabbed the Asset's arm. "My son. Is he next?"_   
  
_"I have no additional orders."_   
  
_"Good. That's..." The Target's eyes drifted shut. "He'll have Obi. Obi will take care of him, keep him safe."_   
  
_The Target had reached a critical level of blood loss and his heart beat began to slow. The Asset pressed fingers to the man's neck, waiting for the moment of death._   
  
_"He's going to be so angry when we find him." The sentence was barely audible._   
  
_"Who?" The Asset should include that in his report. The Target didn’t answer. He was dead._

* * *

He hadn't seen Simmons for a week when he opened his door one morning and found her and Trip wrapped around each other in the hallway. He almost turned right back around and shut the door when he heard Trip say, "He'll get better, okay? No one is at their best after a few months in a coma."

Her only answer was a sob. "I can't. I can't."

Trip looked up and mouthed 'help,' so Bucky pulled his door shut and went over. Trip kissed the top of her head. "Fitz woke up."

* * *

"So," Bucky started sawing through the rope binding Coulson's hands behind his back. "You never mentioned you were a genetically modified high value target."  
  
Coulson made a muffled noise behind the gag. May just crossed her arms, she didn’t seem interested in his excuses. "Do you believe me now, that you don't belong in the field?"  
  
Whatever response he gave was still muffled by the gag. Coulson could disagree all he wanted, Bucky was with May on this. The rope finally gave way and Coulson pulled the gag loose and spat to clear his mouth. "Is the base secure?"  
  
"We're clear. Trip is planting the explosives." May jerked him to his feet. "We should have left you tied up. Barnes could have carried you out and we'd already be on our way back to base." She was always very contained; if Bucky hadn’t spent few decades as a blank faced killer he wouldn’t be able to tell she was seething under her calm exterior.  
  
"Noted." Coulson had noticed it, too. "Let's go."  
  
They found Trip at the entrance, guarding a trussed up HYDRA agent. "Hey, boss, I got you some take-out intelligence."  
  
When the man, in a fucking lab coat, of course, caught sight of Bucky he shouted, “Арте́льный горшо́к гу́ще кипи́т.”  
  
"What does a pot have to do with anything?" Bucky was tempted to gag the man. After he'd done it to Coulson, it was only fair.  
  
"No, you're him, you're the Winter Soldier! Без муки нет науки." He looked so hopeful it must have been crushing when Bucky just pressed a gun to his head.  
  
"One more word and I pull the trigger." Did he really have code phrases embedded in his brain? What was he supposed to do about that?  
  
Coulson took the gag from his pocket and jammed it into the guy's mouth. "And that's enough of that. Let's get out of here."

* * *

"Oh, it's no trouble at all. I enjoy interrogating people." Koenig looked thrilled to have new people to put in his lie detector chair. "You know, if Eric had asked more precise questions, I bet he'd still be alive."  
  
That was a pretty cold way to talk about a dead friend. "Who's Eric?"  
  
"My brother."  
  
"Right." Koenig didn’t have much mad scientist in him, although something about him was distinctly less than human.  
  
It didn't seem to faze Trip but nothing did. "You have fun, Koenig. Let me know if you need any help moving the body afterwards."  
  
The HYDRA scientist--still gagged and trapped in the strange chair that looked an awful lot like a torture device--started making frantic noises as Trip and Bucky left him to Koenig's strange, but not actually painful questions. Bucky waited until the door shut behind them before he said, "I'm sure this is rude in 2014, but I have to ask. What the hell is Agent Koenig?"  
  
"No idea." They headed towards the men's locker room. Blowing up secret bases was filthy work. "Either Mrs. Koenig gave birth to identical twins who have the exact same hobbies, speech patterns and taste in clothes or..." Trip shrugged. "Nothing surprises me anymore."  
  
"No one asked?" Bucky couldn't believe that, not after his two hour welcome interrogation.  
  
"How do you bring something like that up? Hey, Agent Koenig, are you a robot?" Trip pushed open the door to the locker room. "Everybody here has secrets. Fury trusts him, that was enough for Coulson."  
  
The Playground's showers were high-powered, which was good because he had gravel in places he didn't want to think about. When he was done, he found Trip by the lockers cleaning a gash on his leg. "You ever see that cartoon where Hercules is fighting a hydra and the heads keep growing back and growing back until he's buried under them?"  
  
Bucky grabbed a pair of pants from his locker. "You don't catch a whole lot of movies when you're a mindless killing machine."  
  
"We should give it a watch."  
  
It was the first overtly friendly overture he'd gotten in a base full of people who couldn't seem to trust him. "Sure."

* * *

"Bucky, wake up. Someone's trying to get in."  
  
It was Steve's voice and yes, now that Bucky was drifting closer to wakefulness he could hear the beep of the electronic lock. Bucky slid his hand under his pillow and gripped the hilt of his knife. The door slowly creaked open and Bucky lay still, pretending to be asleep as whoever it was got closer.  
  
“Ту́лу со свои́м самова́ром не е́здят.” It was Skye.

“Your accent is terrible.” He rolled over and came face to face with what he hoped was an icer.

“Koenig just finished interrogating the scientist you brought in. He claims it’s impossible you broke your conditioning. He says you’re faking and he gave us a list of all your command codes. Apparently, they’ve been waiting for you to wander home for months. Ври, да помни.”

“I’m fine.” He hadn’t felt anything when she’d said the phrases, or when the HYDRA agent had. He could still see Steve, sitting on the edge of the bed, half asleep and pissed about being woken up. “Still me.”

“Sure.” Skye holstered the gun. Something was a little off about her. When she spoke he caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath. “Exactly the same as before.”

“She wants it to be true.” Steve sounded certain and Bucky had to agree. “She came here to kill you.” Were there bullets in that gun?

“Now that we’ve established I’m still me, did you need something else?” It wasn’t just the alcohol clouding her judgment. Her hate for HYDRA was just as deep as his, sometimes it felt like she’d rather kill him then pass the salt. Bucky wondered sometimes if he’d killed someone close to her, even though he’d been frozen for most of her life, because no matter what he did, she still didn’t trust him, not even a little.

“Guess not.”

He couldn’t go back to sleep after she left. The rooms here didn’t physical locks on the doors, just the electronic ones Skye could apparently hack three sheets to the wind. Instead, he read for a while, trying to distract himself, to keep the panic from crawling up his spine. When he looked back, Steve was reading over his shoulder. “Come on, Bucky, turn the page.”

Bucky flipped the page, even though the words weren’t making any sense. “You want to help, you’re more distracting naked.”

“We could do that.” Steve laid his hand on Bucky’s thigh. Maybe he wasn’t getting better, but at least he wasn’t getting any worse. He still couldn't feel Steve's hand.

“It’s a terrible idea.” He’d jerked off to his memories of Steve often enough, it wouldn’t have been any different. If he was just a little more broken, if he’d been able to imagine Steve’s touch, he would have done it in a heartbeat.

Lips he couldn’t feel pressed against his forehead. “We could go. Howard’s son can’t be that bad. I bet he doesn’t blow himself up all the time.”

“You never even met Howard, you’re just telling me what I want to hear.” He couldn't go to Stark, not knowing what he'd done to Howard. Bucky closed his book and lay back down, turned off the light. He curled around a pillow and stared at the door where he’d shoved a chair under the knob. “I’m lonely, Steve.”

“I know, Buck. I’m sorry, I wish I was here with you.”

He didn’t sleep, just got up for breakfast at seven and ate at the same table with Skye like nothing happened.

* * *

**August 2014**

“Simmons? Are you okay?” She was sitting at the table in the mess, staring at her coffee cup like she didn’t understand what it was for. She was also covered in blood. A quick visual inspection showed it wasn’t hers, but she was pretty well splattered. She didn’t answer and he touched her shoulder.  
  
Simmons startled, dropping the cup. The mug shattered. “Bucky. I didn’t here you come in.”  
  
He’d gotten shoes that squeaked just to stop surprising people like this, but Bucky wasn’t sure she would have noticed him if he’d set off an air horn. “Who’s hurt?” No one was out in the field right now, as far as he knew, but Coulson kept a lot of secrets.  
  
Simmons looked down, as if noticing her lab coat was bloody for the first time. “Oh. I didn’t… Everyone’s fine.”  
  
She was lying, of course. Bucky got a rag for the coffee and filled a new cup for her. “Do you need… If you need something taken care of, I can do it for you.” He was good at sanitizing crime screens and disposing of bodies.  
  
“No, I don’t need anything.” She gave him a tired smile so fake Bucky couldn’t believe she was even trying.  
  
Simmons didn’t seem to get his meaning. “I owe you, for my arm. Whatever it is, I’ll make it go away.”  
  
“I wish you could.” She shrugged out of her bloody coat. “I was going to go check on Fitz. Will you come with me?”  
  
“Sure.”

* * *

Fitz circled Bucky, staring at his cybernetic arm. Simmons had opened the access panel for him, his fine motor skills had deteriorated from the hypoxia.. “The arm is…”  
  
“Impressive?” Simmons was trying to fill in the blanks for without much luck. Fitz just shook his head, unable to summon up the word.  
  
“No, it’s too… too... “ Fitz trailed off, obviously frustrated. “It needs something.”  
  
“Maintenance.” Bucky took a guess. “I’m a couple days overdue. Simmons has been taking care of it for me.”  
  
“I’ll take care of it tomorrow, so he’s ready to go into the field.” Simmons shut the access panel. “Now that you’ve seen it, will you sleep?”  
  
Fitz had drifted back to the 3D model of the arm displayed on his holotable. “It’s not… You can’t just…”  
  
“Please, Fitz.” Simmons led him away from the table and towards the door. “Thank you, Bucky. I’m sure Fitz appreciated the opportunity to see your arm.”  
  
“Anything that decreases my downtime is a good thing.” Bucky thought Fitz looked angry at being sent to bed, but he’d never met the man before so what did he know? “Honestly, I’m just glad you figured out the maintenance routine.”  
  
Simmons hesitated before she said, “Yes. Of course.”  
  
That was a lie and Bucky suddenly wondered exactly what she was doing to his arm when she worked on it.

* * *

The base was a small one and its specialty had been in Fundraising. For HYDRA, that had meant everything from credit card scams to arms dealing, so no one was quite sure what to expect.

Coulson had seemed better for the past few days, with fewer mental lapses. Bucky had caught him swallowing a handful of pills at breakfast, seen Jemma watching him in a way he was sure she thought was stealthy. It must have given May some confidence that he was getting better, because when she’d planned the mission, she’d spec-ed it out for a three man team inside and Coulson on the coms running the missions. With Skye to back him up, it had seemed safe enough that Bucky hadn’t said a word. He knew what it was like to have a sick friend who refused to admit anything was wrong.

It all went sideways before they even got started. Coulson hadn’t come down out of his office when they’d landed and May had gone up after him. She’d come down alone, looking perfectly composed, and only his espionage training let him see through her act. “Coulson is sitting this one out. Trip, you’re going to run the mission. Barnes and I will be going inside. Skye, get started on the security systems.”

"Wait, what? What is he doing up there that is so important?" May just ignored Skye and walked out of the briefing room. "I haven't seen him in weeks, and now he's bailing on a mission?"

Some old folks in the building he’d lived in had what they called dementia now. Bucky didn’t think Coulson was old enough for that. It had to be his modifications, whatever they were. Bucky had tried to find out what happened to him, but the medical reports had to be a complete fabrication. Bucky had killed enough people to know no normal human could survive a chest wound like the one in the records.

He followed May to where the tactical gear was kept, laundered field suits and cleaned equipment neatly laid out for three. “I have a variant of the serum.”

“I know, I’ve read your file.” She didn’t even look at him as he stripped, just pulled on her own jumpsuit.

“It doesn’t always work. The odds are bad. After they got access to me, the Soviets gave it to kids. They had a ten percent survival rate.” They had been so proud of that number, of the little girls they’d turned into killing machines.

“The Director was not treated with the Super Soldier Serum.” She slid pistols into her holster, even though he knew she preferred hand to hand. “Grab your rifle. We’ve got a base to clear.”

It was a dismissal if he’d ever heard one.

* * *

At first, it seemed like they’d gotten lucky.

The base was your standard HYDRA secret base, grey halls and grey doors with florescent lights and recycled air. It was also empty. They cleared the whole base, room by room. As they went, Bucky felt increasingly edgy. It was against all protocols to abandon an uncompromised base. Even if most of the staff here had been amoral opportunists, every HYDRA group had at least one true believer. Even if his colleagues had killed him to save their own skins, where was his body?

May seemed similarly concerned by the lack of resistance. “Can you think of any reason a base would be abandoned like this?”

“Mutiny?” There should have been signs of a struggle if there had been a mutiny. It wasn't right that the base was pristine like this. “No. It’s a trap, somehow.”

Trip’s voice came over the coms. “Skye is seeing a big power draw from the room at the end of the hall. If someone’s making a last stand, that’s where they are.”

May gave him a go-ahead gesture and he ran Skye’s code-breaker card though the electronic lock. The lock gave a beep and the light on the access panel turned green. When Bucky tugged on the door, it opened. The door stayed open on its own once opened and he stared dumbly at the room for a few seconds, not believing what he was seeing.

May must have found it less stunning, she recovered quicker. “The computer systems are intact. Skye, I need you in here.”

“No one’s going anywhere until I get up to speed.” Coulson had come onto the coms. “Barton, what do you see?”

Barton again. He didn’t reply quickly enough and Coulson spoke again, “If someone doesn’t get me a sitrep, I’m calling this mission right now.”

May gave him a nod and Bucky clicked his mic back on. “The base is abandoned and in near perfect condition. The computer systems are intact.”

Intact was an understatement. The room was awash in fluorescent light, a computer monitor still powered on and showing a blue log-in screen. Whatever had happened here to make them abandon base, it had happened fast. Unless it was a trap. It was probably a trap.

“So it’s a trap.”

“Well, I’m glad everyone agrees.” The lack of resistance was keeping Bucky on edge even though he and May had cleared the base. Maybe the trap was in the data? “The base is deserted and we’re not going to be able to access anything without Skye.” May made another gesture and Bucky muted his mic before he spoke again. “Wanna tell me why he keeps calling me Barton?”

They were missing a sniper and Bucky had watched a lot of news after DC. If Hawkeye had turned up in public, Bucky would have known about it.Trip was a hell of a field agent but hadn't been with them the day they'd taken down Mike Peterson in a train station. He’d seen the footage on the news during coverage of Cybertek’s fall.

May's response didn't actually answer his question. “As far as I know, Coulson hasn’t seen Agent Barton since the incident at Pegasus.”

Everyone at the Playground had ghosts. It made him feel somewhat at home, at least.

Skye rapped on the jamb of the open door, laptop in hand. “When you said intact, you weren’t kidding. I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘not completely destroyed’ instead of password protected.” She set her laptop down on an empty workstation. “This is going to take some time. Less time than I expected, but you may want to find some chairs.” She took the only chair in the room and pulled the keyboard forward. “Unless Barnes has a logon.”

“The Winter Soldier didn’t need to do a whole lot of typing.” His handwriting was very neat, if he’d needed to submit reports they’d given him a pen.

“Like I said, chairs.” She plugged something into one of the USB slots and the screen changed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Whatever she was doing was beyond him, although it seemed to be working. At least blocks of data were crawling across the screen. That meant progress in the movies Trip had shown him.

“Oh, gross.” The keyboard was starting to ooze and Skye made a face. Just as she finished speaking, everything went to hell. The keyboard and monitor exploded. The ooze must have been some kind of jellied accelerant because her hands went up in flames instantly. She screamed and it was an almost inhuman noise. The seconds between the scream and May shoving her to the floor seemed to go on forever.

He tore off his jacket and started smothering the flames on her hands. It just made her scream louder, but it had to be done. May had her pack open and she grabbed a syringe from the medical kit, uncapping it with her teeth before she shoved the needle into Skye's leg. Whatever it was, it was fast acting, her screams died out into sobs.

It was only after the immediate crisis passed that Bucky realized Coulson was screaming in his ear. “Skye! Barnes, May, someone tell me what the hell is happening.”

Skye’s com line must have been open, so Coulson could hear her softly crying. Her hands were blistered and strangely white in places. The sickening odor of burnt synthetic fibers in the small room. May pushed up to her feet and grabbed Skye's equipment bag. “I’m calling it. Pick her up, we need to go, now.”

“No!” When Bucky picked her up as gently as he could manage, she started screaming again. “Don’t touch me. May, please, don’t let him take me!”

He made it a whole two steps before the door slammed shut. The indicator light turned red and Bucky heard a clicking sound as the electronic lock engaged. They were trapped.


	5. The Asset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The jolt of electricity staggered him and it must have been calibrated just right.
> 
> It was the Winter Soldier who straightened up and slammed his metal arm into the throat of the man who had hit him.

“You know, some days, you just get lucky.” Part of the wall, an inconspicuous grey panel indistinguishable from the one beside it, had been slid aside. A man in a labcoat stood in the doorway, fluorescent light spilling into the room from behind him. “Gotta say, you have guts. I can’t think of many people stupid enough to steal the Winter Soldier.” In one hand he had what looked like a ray gun. Bucky hoped it wasn’t actually a ray gun.

“We didn’t steal him.” May’s hands were resting on the butts of her guns. They could take down one scientist, easy, even if it was a ray gun. “He’s salvage.”

“Salvage.” The scientist raised an eyebrow. “So, what, the two of you are thieves? You break into our bases and steal information, sell it to the highest bidder?”

“It’s a living.” May’s tone was dry as dust. “We found him, he’s ours, end of story.”

“People like you disgust me.” He pointed the ray gun at Skye. “Step away from him.”

“Talk about disgusting. You’re a Nazi.” Skye kicked at Bucky. “Put me down before he shoots us.” The Soldier would have obeyed a direct order like that, so Bucky set her down. It wasn’t the best plan, if they had to run. She swayed when her feet hit the ground, but stayed standing. “Look, we outnumber you. Just… open the door and we can all walk out of here.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He gave a whistle and Bucky could hear the thud of combat boots against the concrete floor of the base. “Did you think I was alone here?”

He counted a half dozen as they came out of the passageway, all in body armor and carrying weapons. Over the com, he heard Coulson hiss, “Centipede soldiers.”

Even though most of the people modified by HYDRA using the Centipede process had been coerced every group had true believers, volunteers. With Skye’s hands in the state they were, she couldn’t fight. Getting them out of here would be up to him and May. Two against seven wasn’t great odds, even if his enhancements were better, even if May had the best hand to hand of any baseline human he’d ever met.

“Barnes, you can’t let them take Skye captive. We can’t let HYDRA get their hands on her, not even temporarily.” Coulson sounded desperate. “She’s not human. We can’t let them find out.”

He spared a glance for May, who nodded. Shit, really? Why did no one tell him this stuff?

“Welcome home, Soldier.” The HYDRA scientist was grinning, his smile showing teeth. Bucky wanted to break his face. “We’ve been waiting for you.” The Centipede soldiers surged forward as Bucky drew his pistols.

As they came forward, Bucky gave Skye a shove out of the line of fire. She hit the wall shoulder first instead of catching herself with her hands. He heard her groan, then the enemy made contact and he couldn’t think about her any more. Three of them had charged him, all of them carrying stun weapons.

One of them, faster than the others, got in a single solid hit to the head with his stun baton. The jolt of electricity staggered him and it must have been calibrated just right.

It was the Winter Soldier who straightened up and slammed his metal arm into the throat of the man who had hit him. His neck broke with an audible crack and the Asset tossed him aside to turn to his next opponent.

The HYDRA scientist was shouting something about samovars. The Asset ignored him. The next two came at him together, one sweeping low to get him off his feet while he was still regaining his balance while the second swung his stun baton at the Asset’s face. Neither had fired a shot, he was too valuable to shoot.

When the baton connected, he felt his nose break. He had no orders to keep any of their attackers alive so he fired a round into the man’s abdomen. His shot, a standard round, didn’t make it through the man’s body armor but it did make him step back. His comrade quickly moved to fill the gap, jabbing at the Asset with another stun baton.

Something outside his normal operating mode had happened the first time, the Asset wouldn’t let them shock him again. He used his metal arm to tear the baton free, flipped it in his grip and jammed it against the soldier’s forehead. The weapon had obviously been designed to take something like him down. For a Centipede soldier, it was enough to kill.

Two of the soldiers were down and the one he’d shot at was coming back for more. He heard the SHIELD agent saying, “Wish I had that damn staff,” and he saw her wrangling with two other Centipede soldiers. The Agent fired every shot in her clip for their heads before she rolled behind a desk for cover.

He couldn’t see the other one, the Technician he’d been ordered to protect. He could hear soft moaning from her general direction and as long as she was alive, he had other concerns. Two men dead, two men fighting the Agent, and one coming at him. That was five. Where was the other man?

He concentrated his attention at the enemy in front of him. He fired his gun at the man’s abdomen again, where the body armor was already weakened. By the end of his clip, red bloomed through the armor and the Asset drew the knife from his belt to cut the Centipede soldier’s throat. He wiped off the blade and changed clips.

The Agent was holding her own against the Centipede soldiers for now, but she needed back up. He lunged at one of her attackers and slammed him into the wall.

The sound of the technician moaning stopped. Was she dead? When he spared a moment to look for her, the man he was grappling with got the upper hand and shoved the stun baton into his chest. For a second, the Asset couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. A second shot landed on his shoulder, where flesh met metal. If he had been a man, he would have screamed because it felt like fire and left his cybernetic arm limp and useless. The Asset wasn’t a man, he only growled.

“Barnes.” The Director was shouting something. “Barnes, the light is green.”

The light on the electric door lock was indeed green. The Asset caught a glimpse of the Technician crawling towards it. Her phone was clasped in one hand, its screen smudged and filthy.

The Asset needed to get to her. He wrapped his hand around the Centipede soldier’s neck. The arm was flesh, but he was strong and when his fingers touched the metal of an implant he knew what to do. He tore the man’s implant free. The man screamed, louder than the technician had when HYDRA had lit her on fire and the Asset smashed his head against the wall, once, twice, three times before it left a blood stain and the Asset let it fall to the floor.

The sound of another gunshot echoed as May fired into the last Centipede soldier’s head. She’d been close enough to get blow back of his shattered skull on her and she looked disgusted as she wheeled towards her next opponent.

The only one left was the HYDRA scientist, who stood rooted to the spot, looking dazed, his mouth slightly open. “What have you done to him?”

“We didn’t do anything.” She wiped the gore from her face. “Barnes, can you carry Skye? We’re leaving.” Little bits of his guard's brain splashed onto the scientist, who shuddered. “You can walk out with us or you can die here. It’s up to you.”

The scientist chose to walk. The Asset picked up the Technician and slung her over his shoulder. This time she didn’t complain. The Asset saw no sign of the sixth Centipede soldier, when he returned the Technician to the Director he would have to come back.

The Agent covered his back as they walked down the corridor towards the exit, her gun trained on their prisoner. “Barnes, say something.” Her normally calm tone had a hint of worry. “How badly are you hurt?”

He was damaged but still operational, although with his arm offline he was less effective. “The cybernetics are damaged. I’ll need repairs.”

Her steps faltered, just for a moment. Maybe she wasn’t planning on repairing him? She didn’t ask him more questions, just spoke into her com. “Coulson, we’re bringing the HYDRA scientist in for interrogation. Trip, start the pre-flight and call Simmons, tell her we’ve got wounded.” That worried tone was back. “Barnes is gone.”

“May, I can see him on the cameras. He’s right in front of you.” The Asset didn’t understand. Wasn’t Barnes what they called him? He hadn’t gone anywhere unexpected.

“That’s not Barnes.” She was still walking, still covering his back. “I think Barnes has been under since he took down the first Centipede soldier.”

The four of them boarded the plane and the Asset headed straight for the medical bay. He lay the Technician down onto a bench and stepped aside as the Director came into the room. He put his hand on the Technician’s forehead. “Hold on, May’s going to get you something for the pain.”

The Agent was filling a syringe. “We need to get her field gear off.” She grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the sleeves off at the elbow. “Barnes, go sit on the other table. You’re in the way.”

He sat on the other bench and waited. He was damaged but stable. The Technician was going into shock. She was the Director’s weakness, of course he would want her cared for first.

“Plane’s ready when you are, May.” The Specialist crowded into the room. “He looks fine to me. Aside from being half dead. You want an ice pack for that nose?”

His whole face throbbed. Ice would reduce the swelling. “Yes.”

The Agent jabbed the needle in. “Barnes, what’s your status?”

“Cybernetics are offline due to electrical damage. My nose is broken but the orbital is only bruised. I have an electrical burn on my chest and a second on my shoulder from contact with the stun baton. My biological hand is numb.” He had survived worse, he would heal. When they returned to base, the Doctor would have to repair his arm. The rest would heal without assistance. “The mission isn’t complete. You should let me return to the base to terminate the final Centipede soldier.”

The Specialist had a chemical cold pack in hand and he activated it before he passed it over. “You’re not going anywhere, Bucky, except to see Jemma.”

“Jesus.” The Technician was struggling as the Agent tried to strap her down, her pupils dilated from the fast acting narcotics she’d been given. “This is the Winter Soldier? I get why they made him wear a mask and goggles. He looks like a sad robot.”

Who else would he be? The Asset pressed the cold pack to his nose and wondered why everyone was staring at him.

“Skye, lay back down and be quiet.” The Director’s voice was a sharp command. “He defended Skye and May. Why would he do that?”

“You ordered me to.” The Asset let the ice pack drop away. “I need to go back.”

The Director sat down in a chair and rubbed at his temples. “No, I can’t let you do that. You’re wounded.”

“I can complete the mission. This isn’t like before. If you let me go back, I’ll terminate the target.” The Director and Agent had never frozen him. The Asset had been working very hard to complete all the objectives, so they wouldn’t have a reason to. The new SHIELD was a small operation and he was expensive to maintain, he had to be useful.

“You’re not going back in.”

The Director was damaged. The Agent ran the operation and she was tougher, she wouldn’t care that he was hurt. The Asset turned to her. “He’ll get away. He could inform others of our existence. We could lose the element of surprise on the other bases.”

She seemed to think it over then shook her head. “We didn’t bring you into the field, we brought Bucky Barnes. You haven’t been through vetting and you’re damaged. Trip and I will go in.”

“Or we could blow the base.”

No one yelled at the Technician for disobeying a direct order, although the Director did sigh. “And how do we do that without going back in?”

“My USB drive is still plugged in.” The Technician reached for her phone only to have the Agent pull a restraint across her chest, pinning her down. “Hey!”

“Your hands are damaged. You can’t type.” The Agent picked up the phone. “Tell me what to do.”

They triggered the self-destruct mechanism remotely, but it still bothered the Asset that he hadn’t seen the kill. The Agent told him to sleep, so he lay back down and closed his eyes.

* * *

_**January 1943** _

_No one ever came back from Doctor Zola’s ‘interrogation.’ Bucky had written a letter to Steve and pressed it into Jones’ hands before they’d dragged him out. Bucky hadn’t gone quietly; he’d broken one guard’s nose and another’s wrist before they’d beaten him with the butts of their rifles and dragged him feet first to the table._

_If he’d been taken by regular German forces, it would have been different. He was an American and American prisoners got the best treatment. There would even have been the chance for Red Cross oversight. HYDRA was a different beast. The minute they pulled him out of the cell, Bucky had known he was going to die._

_He hadn’t wanted to give them the satisfaction of answering their questions, even though they hadn’t been about the army. They had wanted to know about his parents, about how well he’d done in school, how his eyesight was._

_Bucky had spit in their faces and all he’d given them was his name, rank and service number._

_That bit of defiance just made them angry and whatever they injected into his veins burned like nothing he'd ever felt before. The first time he’d been convinced they'd actually lit him on fire. When he didn’t burn, didn't die, they started cutting into him._

_He would have told them anything at that point to make it stop. They didn’t give him the chance, no one had listened to him and now he was beyond talking._

_He was going to die on this table, but he would die himself and a while from now Steve would get a letter, telling him to find a nice girl and marry her, as long as it wasn’t Becca._

_Barnes, Sergeant, 325725._

_Steve was going to be so angry that Bucky had gone and gotten himself killed. Bucky reminded himself Steve was home and safe and he knew Bucky had loved him. That was good, that he knew, because Bucky was never going to get a chance to say it again._

_325725._

_It hurt, inside. Maybe he would bleed out before they came back._

_After a while, the world went away. Name, rank and serial number. He was James Barnes, Sergeant, 325725. He couldn’t forget._

_Someone was tugging at his straps. “Bucky. Oh my god.”_

_He couldn’t focus his eyes. It was crazy to think the voice sounded like Steve. How long had it been, since his last letter from Steve? A hand touched his shoulder and the world snapped back into focus. “Is it?”_

_“It’s me, it’s Steve.”_

_“Steve?” Bucky smiled, still wondering if he’d died. The voice was right but that wasn’t Steve. Steve didn’t loom, and Steve was safe at home. He let himself be pulled to his feet, wobbly as he was._

_The man looked like Steve, if Steve had been born healthy and Mrs. Rogers had been able to feed him properly. If he was dying, this was a hell of a delusion. He was a little disappointed in himself. It was one thing to imagine Steve hale and healthy and another to picture him looking like a Greek god._

_“I thought you were dead.” Steve sounded so desperate, so like himself that Bucky wanted to believe it was real._

_He swayed a bit and Steve, this strange tall and strong Steve, was all that kept him on his feet. They were practically falling into each other's arms in the middle of this hellhole. “I thought you were smaller.”_

_“Come on.”_

* * *

Bucky woke up in SHIELD medical, in one of the hospital beds. He was covered in cold sweat and he couldn’t feel his left arm but he was himself.

Skye was in the hospital bed across from him and Coulson and Bucky's hallucination of Steve were sitting between their beds.

Coulson had come prepared for a long wait, he was reading a book. “Barnes.” He turned a page. “I assume?” His tone was as dry as dust. “Did you know that could happen, that the Winter Soldier was still in there?”

“No. I wouldn’t have kept that from you.” The dream had the same unnatural vividness as all his other recovered memories. “I wouldn’t keep something important secret from you, not if it would hurt the mission.”

“Point taken.” Coulson put a slip of paper in his book and closed it, the picture of an unflappable government agent, like he hadn’t almost gotten them all killed by flaking on a mission. “Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

“You draw on the walls in yours.” Bucky sat up and rolled his neck. “I don’t know how you pictured it, me overcoming the Soldier. Let me clear it up for you. It wasn’t neat and it wasn’t easy."

Bucky had been so sure the Asset was gone. The person he was now—the new and damaged, but nevertheless whole Bucky Barnes— had resisted the HYDRA command codes without any trouble at all. If the Winter Soldier was still with him, he was a risk to the mission.

Coulson could have had him put down, the Asset wouldn’t have resisted. Instead, he had sat beside Bucky’s hospital bed to see who woke up. "He obeyed my orders. It was refreshing, considering no one else does."

If Coulson had meant it as a joke it fell flat. This was May's operation and they both knew it. When she’d let him stay, it must have been with the confidence that she’d be able to take him out if she had to. She was a dangerous woman, he hoped they’d never have to find out.

"He always obeyed his handlers, until DC." Until Captain America had called him Bucky and changed everything. Coulson probably knew that. Everyone at the Playground probably knew that. "I started to remember being Bucky Barnes. When I decided to leave, to find your team and fight HYDRA, I used his name. It belonged to me, if it belonged to anyone. Not everything came back, but I remembered Nathan’s hot dogs and my mother’s perfume. Mostly, I remembered Steve.”

“You joined us because you though that’s what he would have done.” Coulson’s paraphrase rang an odd note in Bucky’s mind. No one had asked him who Steve was, they’d all just seemed to know.

“It all comes back in pieces, when I sleep. Bucky's memories and the Asset's. Just now, I was dreaming about the HYDRA prison camp...” Bucky trailed off. He wasn't sure how to put this without sounding insane.

He still hadn’t thought of a way when Skye came to, letting out a pained moan. “Look who else is awake.” Coulson hit the call button. “Just hold on for a minute, Skye.”

The button summoned Jemma in a hurry. She injected something into Skye’s IV bag that seemed to take the edge off. Bucky had expected her to fall back asleep. Instead her eyes stayed open, if distant, and she shifted around in bed.

Bucky was glad, he hated to see people laying still and quiet in their hospital beds. He’d done enough of that in Brooklyn.

Her hands were swathed in bandages and Coulson was touching her shoulder, saying something he probably thought was soothing. Did he understand how bad the odds were on recovering from an injury like that? Even with modern medicine, Bucky had to wonder if she’d ever be able to use her hands again.

Jemma came over to check on him. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. You’ve got bigger problems than a banged up super-soldier.” Bucky relaxed back against the pillows. He could deal with a few burns that would be healed by tomorrow.

Jemma gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You’re very good at that. If I hadn’t examined you, I would have no idea you were lying to me.”

“I really have been worse. Isn’t this normally when you break out the food bribes?” If he didn’t think Jemma would have Trip drag him right back, Bucky might have tried to make a break for it. Bucky hoped Skye didn’t know he was here, she wouldn’t want him to see her vulnerable like this.

Jemma produced a granola bar from the pocket of her lab coat. “I’m just trying to keep up with your metabolism.” Skye was staring at her bandaged hands, her lips were moving but no sound was coming out. “Excuse me just for a moment.”

Steve, still in his chair, just sighed. “See? They care about you,” As if Bucky was four and didn’t know that for himself. Then again, Steve was just a hallucination who told him what he wanted to hear so maybe he did need to be told. He couldn’t exactly answer with Jemma and Coulson right there.

They were both focused on Skye and no one was paying any attention to Bucky. His right hand groped around the bedside tray, stretching his IV lines to their limits and almost sending the water pitcher crashing to the floor, before he made contact with the tablet computer.

His cybernetic arm was completely out of commission, so he was working one handed with the tablet balanced on his thigh. Even before Zola, Bucky had always had steady hands. They were shaking now, as he opened up a web browser. It took him a couple tries to click on the search engine box.

 _Cap_ …

 _Captain America_ came up as a suggested search term right away and _Captain America Costume_ was the second. Bucky took a deep breath. He was still hooked up to the monitors, he didn’t want Jemma swooping in to see what he was doing.

 _Captain America S_ …

The first suggested search term took Bucky’s breath away. There was no way skinny, color blind, anemic, rheumatic Steve Rogers and Captain America were the same person... right?

Nothing made any sense. A strange buzzing noise filled his ears, worse than any time the Asset had blown out his eardrums, and his lungs burned. He realized he was holding his breath and Bucky made himself breathe out and gulped for air. He must have made a sound, because the next thing he knew was Coulson at his bed telling him to breathe.

"Barnes, what's the matter?" Coulson’s calm tone belied the underlying panic. Bucky would have laughed in his face if he'd had the breath for it.

He needed to get a hold of himself. He clenched his right hand until his short nails dug into his palm. The little flare of pain helped him focus. He shoved the tablet at Coulson. "Tell me this is true."

“Wikipedia?” Coulson looked at the screen. “It depends on the article but the moderators for the Captain’s page take their jobs very seriously.”

Coulson didn’t understand and Bucky tried again. “Is it really him? Is Steve really Captain America?”

Coulson blinked, looking at the tablet in his hand then back at Bucky. “Is that a joke? You’ve known him since you were eight. Of course it's the truth.”

Steve suddenly but calmly got out of his chair and came around the side of the bed. "I'll see you soon, Bucky." He gave Bucky's hand a squeeze and Bucky felt the ghost of sensation before Steve let go and walked away.

He'd felt that, he'd- He was going crazy.

“You mean you really didn't remember that your best friend is--?” Coulson interrupted that bit of self-analysis. He sounded a little incredulous, as if everyone was supposed to know Steve Rogers was Captain freaking America. Probably everyone was. He bet they’d slapped Steve’s picture in every history book printed since the war.

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut, mind racing. How had it happened? Steve must have told him but that bit was still missing. The serum. The idiot had taken the serum. The serum that Zola had injected into Bucky on the operating table in the camp in Austria, the one—

Bucky knew the odds from the Red Room project. One in ten survived with some positive effects. Had he Steve known that, known the risks? It probably wouldn't have mattered. Steve had always been stupid brave.

“Oh my god! Really? This is too good.” Skye shattered his train of thought. She was laughing, almost hysterically. Bucky hoped it was the drugs, that she didn’t enjoy his suffering quite this much. “You’ve been hiding here for months, with Coulson’s shrine and Trip’s hero worship and you never asked? You’re not HYDRA, you’re pathetic.”

“Skye, enough.”

“He was in love with tiny little pre-serum Steve Rogers. Don’t you get it?” She laughed again, a wild sound. “It didn’t make any sense for him to come here, not when every newspaper was covering Captain America’s hospitalization. He’s been hiding with us, licking his wounds, just like the rest of us.”

“She’s right.” Bucky pressed down on the top of his hand where Jemma had put the IV and pulled the line out. “I could remember Steve, and I could remember the Captain.” He peeled the monitor probes off, ignoring the shriek of the machines. “I thought he was dead. He was the first thing I remembered, back when I was still the Winter Soldier and then all of a sudden, he was gone and the Captain was there.” He’d put three bullets in Steve and just left him on a river bank bleeding. How was he ever supposed to make up for that? “I need to go look for him.”

“If I’d known, I would have told you.” Coulson looked like he meant it, too. It wasn't just a line. Even if it had meant losing Bucky's skillset, he wouldn't have kept this secret. He appreciated the way Coulson cared about his team, even if it had made him hide his condition.

Bucky shoved the sheets and blankets aside. He felt lopsided, his arm just so much dead weight. “What’s wrong with it?”

“They shorted it out. Simmons is pretty sure it was intentional.” Coulson got up and got him a sling from one of the cabinets. “Barnes, as much as I understand the urge to chase after friends who blindly throw themselves into danger, our job’s not done.”

“He wasn’t my friend.” Bucky found a pair of flimsy slippers under the bed and shoved his feet into them. They would have to do. “He’s everything.” He never should have come here. He should have gone to Stark, murdered father be damned. "I need to go to New York."

Coulson caught him by the arm. “Even if I let you pack up and leave right now, the Captain isn’t in New York. He’s been in the field hunting HYDRA for months. We thought that was why you were here. We thought you were looking for him. I will help you find him, I swear, but right now you’re a liability.”

“Right now he’s a basket case.” Skye’s commentary was so helpful.

“Loki snatched Clint Barton right out from under my nose and turned him into a puppet. When we finally got him back, I was dead. I haven’t seen him in two years. I’m dying, I may never see him again.” There was steel in Coulson’s voice, the first hint Bucky had gotten to why he had the Director’s chair. “I will get your arm fixed and I will find Steve Rogers. I just need you to have a little faith. I’ll get you back to him.”

He would need Skye’s help, at least, to find Steve. He could-

"What do you mean, you're dying?" Skye threw her own blankets back and started peeling her monitoring leads off. "What the hell, AC?"

Coulson just hit the call button and slumped in his chair. "I think Skye and I have to have a talk. And Barnes? Just so you know, I had a bet with Jasper about you and Cap, and you killed him before I could collect.” 

* * *

Simmons’ hands were less steady than usual. "Does anything hurt? I can get you some painkillers."

"It's fine." She hadn't found the fine line between effective pain killer and knocking him unconscious.

"It's not." She yanked the last servo out so hard it smacked Bucky in the ear. "Nothing is fine. Everything is awful."

Jemma was a good doctor, although she didn't’ have much of a bedside manner and she was too hard on herself. "Skye's going to be fine. You can't expect her to recover from a serious injury as fast as I do."

"It's not that. I'm sorry, I haven't slept. Between you and Skye and Fitz I was up all night." She yanked his arm free and set it aside. She just stared at him for a long moment, then nodded her head like she'd decided something. "We lied to you. Or at least, we didn't tell you enough. Come with me. I want to show you something."

* * *

"He can't see or hear us." SHIELD had a man locked in their basement and Jemma seemed like she would rather stab him than look at him. "This is Grant Ward. He jumped out of a plane after me and saved my life. Fitz adored him and Skye... He wasn't just our teammate, he was our friend. Right up until he turned out to be HYDRA."

A mole. Bucky's hand rested on his pistol. "Why is he still alive?"

"Spite, mostly. Coulson won't let him die. He's tried to kill himself twice. I had to patch him up." Jemma's hands were balled up into fists. "Now he says he wants to help us."

Jesus. "Why didn't Coulson have me shot on sight?"

"Because you're Bucky Barnes? We argued about it for hours while you were unconscious. I lost track of how often I had to dose you. You’re terribly difficult to sedate." Jemma didn't sit so much as drop into the only chair in the room. "Coulson decided we couldn't afford to say no, not if you passed the interrogation."

No wonder Skye hadn't been able to trust him.

"The Director is very sick. He's been trying to hide it, but I know you saw. I've done all I can from here." When she unclenched her hands her nails had left red marks on her palms. "That's why I'm leaving."

"Where are you going?" He crouched next to her and held out his hand.

"Coulson was treated with an experimental serum we found at a place called the Guest House. The only other group researching it is HYDRA. I already have a job offer and Coulson's permission." She gave his hand a squeeze and let Bucky pull her up. They walked back up the stairs. Neither of them looked back.

When they were back in her lab, all she could offer him was a safety pin for his sleeve. While he gathered up his gear, she sat at her desk. He caught a glimpse of the security feed she used to watch Fitz and he heard her quiet sob.

"It's not just for Coulson, is it?" She was probably the only real friend he'd had in seventy years and he'd gotten to know her pretty well. She had a stubbornness Steve would appreciate.

He touched her shoulder and she turned into him, hiding her face. "I can't stay here anymore. Every time I look at Fitz, I wish I had drowned instead." 

* * *

It had been a miserable day. Bucky was tired, filthy and he was pretty sure Jemma had gotten snot on his shirt. When he got back into his apartment, he started stripping on the way to the bathroom. “Steve?” There was no answer.

He had felt something, when Steve had touched him. Maybe he'd finally scrambled his brains enough or maybe...

Bucky threw the pinned shirt onto the table and did a walkthrough of his rooms. It wasn’t a large space, no bigger than a studio apartment, and Steve had never been hard to find before. There was no sign of him anywhere.

Bucky sat down on the edge of his bed and bowed his head. His fingers dug into the flesh of his thigh hard enough that later he’d find blood under the nails. Now that he knew, he couldn’t fool himself anymore. If he wanted to see Steve again, his Steve, the real Steve of flesh and blood and bone, who was somewhere out there doing God knew what, he’d have to find him. 


	6. Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problem with hope is that it wasn’t invincible.

**April 2014**

When he woke up the second time, Sam was asleep in his chair and Bruce was standing at the end of his bed. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Cap.”

“Thanks, I think.” His guts still ached. He must have been most of the way dead, to still be hurting.

“I’m here to take you home.” Bruce hung the chart he’d been reading back on its hook. “Also, I’m supposed to yell at you about not calling us. I think we’ll skip that part. This is a nice hospital, I wouldn’t want to get too worked up. I’ll leave that part to Tony.”

Home? Where was home? His DC apartment was a crime scene and New York was nothing he recognized. “I’m not going back to New York, not until I find Bucky.”

“Bucky?” Bruce started patting his pockets, eventually fishing out a small flashlight. “Steve, do you know who I am? Tell me the date.”

“He’s fine.” Sam stirred in his chair, stretching awkwardly. “It’s true, I saw him too.”

“Saw Bucky Barnes. That’s,” Bruce paused, flashlight still in one hand. “You know what? Sure. Who am I to talk about plausibility?” He held out a hand to Sam. “Bruce Banner. I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself before.”

“Right, the consultant.” Sam shook Bruce’s hand, half leaning over Steve’s bed. “Doctor Banner’s the one who figured out how to knock you out for surgery. You kept waking up on the table while they were working on you, screaming. Worst combat surgery I’ve ever seen, happening in a full OR.”

Steve hadn’t managed to seriously hurt himself between the serum and now. He’d needed a few stitches after New York and sometimes he got a bit banged up jumping out of planes. For the most part, he hadn’t needed medical care. That had probably been for the best, since Howard had once drunkenly confessed to him that the idea of operating on Steve gave him nightmares. Gut wounds were a terrible way to die, Steve had seen it first-hand.  
“I appreciate it, Bruce.”

“Tony went to fish Clint out of some warzone. I’m supposed to have you back at the Tower by the time he gets home.” Bruce shone the light in Steve’s eyes, maybe just out of spite for the not calling thing. “Pepper hired someone to decorate the apartments. They’re very tasteful, I swear.”

“No.” Steve groped for the bed controller and let it slowly sit him up. “Tell Tony I appreciate the offer, but I have things to do.”

“Okay.” Bruce said the word slowly. It was clear he was just humoring Steve. “I can’t stop Tony if he decided to come fly in your window to try and change your mind in person. If that happen he's going to be pretty ticked off that I didn't throw you over my shoulder and take you by force.”

“That’s fine.” Steve could handle Tony.

Later, when Sam asked if that mild-mannered doctor could really throw Captain America over his shoulder and take him somewhere he didn’t want to go, Steve laughed. It was the last time he laughed for months. 

* * *

Tony did not, as it happened, fly through the window with a burst of rock music. He walked through the door carrying a very large stuffed bear. Tony was in jeans and a baseball cap, practically invisible, and the bear was wearing a Black Widow costume. “Natasha’s testifying before Congress today, if you’re in the mood to watch her be incredibly scary to strangers.”

“Think I’ll pass.” She’d already been pretty scary to him, the two times she’d called. Once had been right after being ordered before Congress, the second time while she was out drinking with Maria Hill. The word suicidal had been thrown around a lot. “You here to persuade me to give up on my crazy plan and come back to New York?”

“Nope.” Tony flopped into the chair beside Steve’s bed and dug into the inside pocket of his jacket. He threw a small box into Steve’s lap. “Brought you that.”

It was a wallet, with a New York license identifying him as twenty-seven year old Steven Grant in the clear plastic slot and a matching Black AMEX in the slot above that. The cash compartment was stuffed full of used, non-sequential, twenties.

“I’ve got one for Wilson too. Rhodey vouched for him, apparently he taught the guy to fly. That’s some quality strange you picked up at the Mall, Cap.”

Steve wasn’t even going to dignify that with a response, even if it was true. Tony Stark didn’t need that kind of ammunition. He poked through the rest of the wallet instead of meeting Tony’s eyes. A gold Triple-A card and the business card of what looked like a very expensive law firm were tucked in the card slots as well. “This isn’t what I expected, based on my conversation with Bruce.”

“Yeah, well,” Tony rubbed at his chest, where the arc reactor used to be. “No one ever carried Bruce out of the desert. I was dead, Rhodey had no reason to believe otherwise and he was getting a lot of pressure to stop looking for me. He didn’t, though, he kept searching and he found me. If you think you can do that for Bucky Barnes, I’m not going to stop you. I’ll do anything I can to help, and that’s a hell of a lot when you’re me.”

Steve stared at the wallet a little numbly. Tony was the last person he’d expected to understand.

“One condition.”

That didn’t mean he wasn’t still a jerk. “What?”

“Hill says you ordered her to fire on the Helicarriers while you were still onboard. No more of that, Steve. You go after Barnes, you come back alive.” Tony had grown up sharing his father with Steve’s ghost, and Steve had been in a bad place right before the Chitauri invasion. Even though the battle had worn the sharp edges off interacting with each other, they still weren’t friends. So Steve was a little surprised when Tony leaned forward and grabbed the hand that wasn’t holding the wallet. “I’m a Stark. I won’t bury you, I can’t.”

Steve flipped the wallet shut one handed. “I’m coming back, Tony.”

“You’d better.” Tony released his grip, slid his sunglasses back on like nothing had happened, and stood. “You know, I could tuck a GPS locator in there for you. Just in case you’re ever wandering in the desert and need a hand.”

* * *

 

Steve had always been just a little greedy when it came to Bucky. He’d shared him with women, because he’d had to and Bucky had shared him with Peggy, because he’d had to. If it was a political landmine for Steve to be bisexual now, it had been an excellent way to get arrested in the forties. Before everything had fallen apart he and Peggy had talked it out. She’d been willing to share him with Bucky if he’d share her with the SSR.

“Be honest.” Sam was leaning in the doorway of their connecting rooms. “Was that ‘on your left’ thing a pass?”

Tony wasn’t wrong about Sam. Steve had watched Sam run for a couple weeks before he’d had to say something, do something. If their lives hadn’t blown up, he’d had plans to awkwardly ask Sam out for coffee. The plan had the added advantage of derailing Natasha’s matchmaking, at least for a while. Things were different now. “Not a serious one.”

He needed Sam’s friendship more than he needed a warm body in his bed.

* * *

**June 2014**

Once Tony started digging, he turned up a few unlikely allies. Steve met up with one of them in Dallas. “Mr. Lydon.”

“Captain.” Miles Lydon seemed like the nervous type. He had chosen a place in the coffee shop where he could sit with his back to a wall. “You know, I never imagine us on the same side. I’ve been shouting for months that SHIELD was bad news. I didn’t think anyone was listening.”

JARVIS had shown him the anti-SHIELD posts Miles had made pre-DC. He’d known there was something rotten about the organization. Someone should have paid attention. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past three years, it’s that someone is always listening.”

“They kidnapped my girlfriend and stranded me over seas. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive until Mr. Jarvis reached out to me.” Miles pushed a flash drive across the table. “This is everything Rising Tide has on SHIELD and HYDRA.”

Steve pocketed the drive and dropped an envelope on the table. JARVIS had mentioned Miles was having some money troubles. “We appreciate your help.”

Miles took the envelope. He didn’t open it, just stared at it. “If you see her, would you tell the Black Widow we have her back? That leak was a thing of beauty.” 

* * *

Steve was hunting rumors while Tony ran down the information from Miles. For the first time, talking to Tony wasn't all business. Steve got the occasional picture of Clint asleep in funny positions, or a Vine of Bruce changing into the Hulk in between yoga poses and once, a video walkthrough of a very nice apartment for the low low price of free when he was ready to come back.

Two months after DC, they got their first break. One of Tony’s contacts had turned up a safe house just outside the city. If Steve had secretly harbored hopes that this was going to be fast or easy, the empty safe house dashed them.

According to the neighbors, someone had been living there, but no one had seen them in a while. The trash had been taken out, the dishes in the drainer were clean and the fridge was empty.

“Whoever was here did a really good job cleaning up after themselves. If it was your boy, I bet he was a hell of a roommate.” Sam’s voice drifted from the pantry. “You want me to talk to the neighbors again?”

“No.” Steve couldn't see the point of bothering them. The older woman next door had been nosey, but nearsighted, and HYDRA had put people up in the house regularly. She called them all visiting businessmen and couldn’t give even a vague description of the latest guest.

“Got something.” Sam had a piece of paper, dusty footprint on the back from being on the pantry floor. “They had groceries delivered.” 

* * *

Steve was lucky, the driver remembered the house and the quiet man who’d stayed there. For the price of a cup of coffee, he told Steve, “The guy never said much and he always paid in cash. I never saw anyone else but he was buying a lot of groceries for one person. Must have been one of those foodies. He made everything from scratch except bread, didn’t even buy cereal. He was a good tipper, though.” The driver took a gulp of coffee. “Lot of corporate guys aren’t. Last time I was out there, we chatted a bit. Turns out he used to run groceries as a kid in the city.”

Steve took a drawing out of his wallet. “This him?”

“Yeah.” The driver nodded. “He was growing a beard, but that’s him. Look, Captain, I’m happy to help, but my manager standing behind you giving me the stink eye. I gotta go.”

“I understand.” Steve shook his hand and let him go back to work. He felt out of breath for the first time since the serum. Bucky had been here. He’d been here and he’d remembered working for Bohack’s hauling groceries. 

* * *

He and Sam didn’t get a hotel that night. Instead, they got Thai food delivered to the safe house and ate at the kitchen table.

“I’m a little weirded out by you being able to use chopsticks. Aren’t you supposed to be an All-American boy?” Sam tore open a packet of soy sauce. “Wanna wreck any other myths while we’re eating?”

“I wasn’t born on the fourth of July.” Sam froze, a piece of chicken halfway to his mouth. “It was the fifth. Senator Brandt thought the fourth made a better story.”

“You can’t just say things like that, Steve.” Sam shook his head and popped the chicken into his mouth. “Eat your noodles and stop ruining my childhood.”

Part of him wanted to push a little more, to make Sam squirm, maybe tell him about the ‘samples’ Howard had wanted after he’d come out of the tube but he didn’t. Sam had given up a lot to come help him chase Bucky, taken a leave of absence from his job and school and sublet his house. There was no reason to be mean.

“Where do you think he went?”

“I don’t know.” Steve twisted his chopsticks into his mountain of noodles, thinking. “I’m the one that was always getting into trouble. Bucky was the guy who worked a lot of overtime, went dancing and patched me up when I did something stupid. He remembers Brooklyn, he might have gone home.” With two weeks of access to a car and the interstate Bucky could be anywhere by now.

“Sure, but you’re not there and there’s nothing to go back to.” Sam said it gently, because he’d come home from war to a different world too, even if he hadn’t been gone as long as Steve.

“No, you’re right.” New York’s bones hadn’t changed, although Brooklyn was almost unrecognizable.

“So what would Bucky Barnes do, after he got free of HYDRA?”

That was an easy one, actually. “Based on personal experience from the first time around? Blow their heads off.” Bucky had fought to stay in Europe when the brass had wanted to send him back to the States for debrief. Not to be with Steve or at least not just to be with Steve. “He hated HYDRA. If he’s remembering things, he’s hunting them.”

“Then we’ll find him.” Sam passed him the rice and the absolute certainty in his voice made Steve feel so much better it was embarrassing.  
\--  
HYDRA’s days of remote mountain bases were apparently over. They found their first ‘secret base’ in a welding shop in Ohio.

Welding shops had two things in abundance: A near endless supply of blunt weapons and many sources of fire. The HYDRA agent they’d cornered was using both to her advantage. They took shelter beside some steel barrels as she dual wielded blow torches, muttering about free will being an illusion.

“Do you think they know they’re basically cartoon villains?” Sam had a bruise on his forehead where she’d grazed him with a wrench.

“I doubt anyone’s told them. You should try.” Steve peeked out from behind the barrel and ducked back down as she let loose a burst of fire in their direction. Sam mouthed ‘distract her’ and crept around the edge of their makeshift shelter. “Ma’am, how exactly do you picture this ending?”

There was a moment of silence then a whoosh as her flame throwers kicked back on. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me! HYDRA is everywhere, you’ll never root us all out. Cut off one head urk-”

Steve looked over the top of the barrels again. Sam was standing over her prone body with a big wrench in hand. “Situational awareness is not her strong suit.”

“Small favors, Sam.” Steve picked her up and held her so Sam could zip tie her hands behind her back. “She strike you as the scientist type?”

“Not really and neither of us are any good at interrogation anyway.” Sam pulled out his phone, a little smile on his face. “Let’s see what Natasha’s up to.”

* * *

“She doesn’t know anything.” Natasha slid into the booth on Sam’s side. She was sitting pretty close and Sam didn’t look like he minded. “HYDRA’s in the middle of a communications blackout. Their network’s gone dark.”

“Isn’t that helpful.” Steve had known it wasn’t going to be easy. If the cells weren’t talking it was going to make them all that much harder to find.

“Apparently,” Natasha helped herself to the pickle off Sam’s plate, “the Winter Soldier is supposed to report in to the nearest HYDRA safe house and wait for further instructions. He should not have ordered groceries, he should not have left. He should have still been sitting there when you found the place.”

“So he’s not the Winter Soldier anymore.” That backed up what the delivery guy had said. “He’s starting to remember things.” Natasha was eyeing his fries and Steve pushed the plate in her direction. She’d brought good news, she could have them.

“The word our new guest used was unstable but she’s a mechie not a biologist.” Natasha nudged Sam who passed her the ketchup. “I need you to be prepared, Steve. When we find him, he might not be the Winter Soldier, but he might not be Bucky Barnes either.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Bucky had saved him and he was remembering. Steve knew it in his bones. That was all that mattered.

It wasn’t the first time Sam had called Natasha. Steve wasn’t stupid, he knew what was going on. She didn’t leave after dinner, she came back to the hotel with them and he could hear their voices in the room next door. They weren’t talking about work.

His hearing was excellent and they were loud, so Steve slept with headphones in. He didn’t need to know what either of them sounded like in bed.

Natasha was gone in the morning and Sam looked a little ragged. Steve didn’t say a word about the red mark just visible at the collar of his friend's shirt, at least not directly. He did say, innocently as he could manage, that Sam must have had quite the workout and looked like he could use a shower. 

* * *

**July 2014**

“Happy birthday.” Tony twisted the cap off a beer and handed it to Steve. “A team dinner isn’t much of a celebration. You know, if you’d given me some notice, I could have thrown you a real party. Fireworks, cake, celebrities-”

Steve took the bottle and clinked it against Sam’s. “That’s why we didn’t call ahead.”

“I just want you to know,” Tony threw the digital image of Sam up on the holotable, “that most people ask for gifts for themselves. Not their ex-Air Force HYDRA hunting buddies.”

“Would you really let anyone else touch them?” Sam was looking at the blueprints for his new wings with just a little hunger. Steve wondered how hard it had been for him to hang them up the first time.

“No, I wouldn’t, and neither should you.” Tony was suddenly serious. “Ask Rhodey how that went. I don’t need a call that you’re splattered on the pavement somewhere because you let someone else work on them. You have a problem, you call me.” 

* * *

Their next raid went poorly.

Their target was holed up in a remote cabin in northern Wisconsin and Sam had done a fly over to get some reconnaissance photos. The HYDRA agent had caught a glimpse of him and fired some kind of sonic weapon at him. Sam had tumbled from the sky and all Steve could do was watch him fall, a panicked voice in the back of his mind going ‘not again, not again, please not again.’

His wings caught before he hit the ground and he skidded and tumbled rather than crashed with no way of stopping. When Steve got to his side, he was bruised and scraped to hell, but he wasn’t broken like Steve had imagined. “Sam?”

“M’okay.” He was curled into a ball and his wings were damaged. It was only when Steve touched his shoulder that he straightened out. “Okay, that’s a lie. Help me get the harness off.”

They told the Urgent Care clinic some lie about Sam falling down a rocky hillside and they gave him some x-rays and a bottle of pain killers. He was covered in bruises, and when they went back to the hotel he was too quiet, staring vacantly at the movie playing on the TV that neither of them was really watching.

It had been too close a call and Sam started having nightmares. Steve could hear him sometimes, shouting for Riley, shouting for Fury and Natasha, shouting for Steve.

Sam had buried his ghosts and Steve had dug them back up. 

* * *

The problem with hope is that it wasn’t invincible.

One night, Natasha was sitting in Sam’s room when Steve went in to ask him where he wanted to go for dinner. “Hey. When did you get in?” It was always good to see her, even if it meant another night of sleeping with his earbuds in, the better to not hear his friends hooking up.

“Hey, Steve.” He got a creeping sense of wrongness from her tired smile.

When Sam shut the connecting door, Steve suddenly felt trapped. “Steve, there’s something Natasha needs to show you. It’s not good, but you need to see it. Sit down, okay?”

Natasha had a video cued up on her tablet and Steve was pretty sure he didn’t want to see whatever was on that video.

Natasha reached over and took Steve’s hand. Her grip was tight and Sam was standing right behind them, hemming him in. “I’m going to show you a surveillance video that I got from one of our Rising Tide contacts. The woman you’ll see is Melinda May, a former SHIELD agent. She was my friend, and Phil Coulson’s too, not that that means anything after Sitwell but the man is Antoine Triplett-”

“Peggy and Gabe’s grandson.” They’d met by accident when they’d gone to visit Peggy at the same time. Of anyone in SHIELD, Steve was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Peggy had raised her family right.

“There’s a third person, someone from Rising Tide. She’d been working with SHIELD.” Natasha squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry, Steve, but she killed him.”

He was hanging on to hope by his fingertips and Natasha’s voice was like hammer blows. Steve had always thought there was still ice in his bones, waiting to freeze him again. Now, he could feel it leaching out. The world felt far away and gray, like it used to be when he was color blind and sick all the time. “No.”

“They were SHIELD. As far as they knew, he was the enemy.” Natasha’s voice sounded strained and Steve realized he was holding her hands too tightly. He jerked away, hot shame burning through the ice. “I didn’t want to show you, but Sam said you would want to see it. So if you do, it’s here.”

“I want to see it.” Natasha was wrong. Whatever she thought she was seeing, she was wrong.

“Alright.” She sounded resigned and he felt the burn of the ice again. “I’m sorry, Steve.”

She hit play. The video quality was worse than he imagined, grainy and black and white like modern film almost never was. Steve took in the scene quickly. The woman, May, looked like she’d just come from combat. Trip looked like he’d fared better.

When Bucky walked into the camera frame, Steve sucked in a breath. He was wearing jeans and he had a scruffy beard. It was Bucky, not the Winter Soldier. It was enough to make him forget what was coming.

Bucky was heavily armed, rifle slung across his back and both May and Trip seemed alarmed. He held his hands up in surrender and let them cuff him before. A third person came into view and put a gun to Bucky’s head. Everyone seemed to be arguing about what to do when, without any warning the woman pulled the trigger.

No.

Steve felt like he’d been the one shot. On screen, Bucky fell to the ground, a pool spreading out from his head. The former SHIELD agents bundled him into their van and drove away.

Steve had wept for Bucky in a bombed out bar a lifetime and three years ago. He had tried to live in this world because that was what Bucky had always wanted, for Steve to live. He’d been willing to die to get him back and only the hunt to find him had kept Steve going for the past few months with everything else he’d known since he woke up in ruins.

All he’d had was hope and Bucky was dead. Some good men had killed him for the Winter Soldier’s crimes and, God, what had they done with his body? There was going to be another empty grave and Steve would never see him again.

The fragile composite wood of the desk crumbled in his hands and suddenly he realized Sam was talking. “Steve, come back. You’re hurting yourself.”

Steve looked down, surprised. His hands were bloody from the wood shards and the metal supports underneath the desktop cutting into them. Steve’s chest heaved, oxygen rushing back into his blood. A hand was on his shoulder. Natasha. “I need to know what you’re thinking, Steve. I can’t let you go after them, not May and Trip.”

No. He couldn’t do that. “The shooter?”

“The video came from Mile Lydon. He called her Skye, but I couldn’t find out much about her. She’d been granted Level One status less than a day before SHIELD imploded. It makes sense that they’ve stayed together.”

Steve brushed the splinters from his hands. “SHIELD was disbanded. Fury swore.”

“They’re hunting HYDRA, same as you. Fury had a bunch of fall back bunkers, May’s probably working from one of them.” Her hand slid from his shoulder to his neck. “Sam, he’s ice cold.”

“Come lay down for a bit, Steve.” He let Sam tug him over to the bed and lay down on his back, staring at the ceiling. “Listen to me, okay? It’s bad right now and you can lie down for as long as you want, but you have to get up again, okay? Don’t lie down and die on me, Steve.”

He lost time. He must have slept at some point, because when he woke up it was dark in the room and Sam was stretched out beside him. Natasha was sitting on his other side, back up against the headboard. “Back with us?”

“Yes.” He’d been thinking about Bucky and the winter of ‘36, about Bucky making him promise not to just lie down and die. “I don’t forget things. Did you know that?”

“I did.” She was in shadow, the only light in the room coming from under the door. Steve could see her face. She pitied him, he hadn’t seen that expression in a long time but he still remembered it. “You could be made to, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It hurts.”

“Do you understand what it means, though? My memories are perfect and so vivid. I can tell you exactly what I’ve done every day since I took the serum. I remember every time I touched him, his terrible morning breath, the smell of his hair cream and the way he would taste like cigarettes when he went on solo missions. I’ve lost him twice. What am I supposed to do now?”

“I told you before, I don’t actually know everything.” She slipped her hands into his hair. “But I think he’d want you to live, after he worked so hard for so long to keep you alive.”

He had to look away, to hide from her eyes. From his other side, Sam made an indignant noise as he was almost shoved off the bed and Steve sat up, slowly. “I don’t want to stop. I want to keep hunting HYDRA.”

“Steve-”

“You should take Sam with you when you go. Or if you don’t want him tagging along, he can have my apartment in Stark Tower.” He could do this alone. It might be better if he did.

“No, I don’t think so.” Sam unwound himself from the cocoon of blankets he’d ended wrapped up in. “Everyone knows you officers are basically helpless. I can’t have you running around on your own.”

“I think I’ll stick around, too.”

“Thank you.” Steve knew no use arguing with either of them. He’d been reckless before, after losing Bucky and they both knew it. “If I can’t save him, I can destroy HYDRA for good this time. I can avenge him.”

* * *

**August 2014**

Half the time when they got to a HYDRA base, it had already been hit. This was the first one to be an actual smoking ruin. “May’s people?” The government wasn’t usually this thorough.

“Someone set off the self-destruct.” Natasha was eyeing the support beams distrustfully. “That’s within the Level One’s skillset. I doubt anyone inside could have survived.”

“Well, you called that one.” Sam brushed a pile of rubble aside, revealing a body. “This guy has some sort of implant on his neck.”

“Centipede?” A three-man team taking down a super-soldier was impressive.

Natasha turned the man’s arm over, exposing the longer metal implant on his arm. “Someone destroyed the main Cybertek facility a week after DC and liberated all the assets. Either they missed one…”

“Or he’s a volunteer.” Sam let the body drop back to the ground. “I’ve agreed to crazier things.”

Steve didn’t like the sound of that. They didn’t need the bastard love children of the serum, Bruce’s experiments and Extremis running around as loyal HYDRA soldiers. “You said May was your friend. Would she take help, if it was offered?”

“If we can find her, I think she would.” Natasha side-eyed him. “You’d be okay working with them?”

“I’d be okay with destroying HYDRA.” It would be hard, maybe impossible, to look at the Level One and not think about her killing Bucky. On the other hand, this destroyed base showed a level of anger he could respect. 

* * *

Steve called Tony and listened to a thirty minute rant about the finer points of mechanical repairs to Colonel Rhodes suit before he could get a word in. It turned out May was running her team out of a rather distinctive Quinjet and Tony had been planning an operation with them. “You want in, Cap? Even Clint is tagging along.”

“Hey!” Clint’s voice drifted over the line. “Whose big mouth got his own house blown up on Christmas, and who spent the past two years quietly doing his job without anyone noticing?”

"We want in." Sam would keep him honest about Skye. He was still Captain America, he could do this.

“The mission is in Alpharetta, which is where I’m pretty sure HYDRA’s secure communications system is stashed, probably right out in the open in an office park with a hundred other corporate data. We all know there’s a pretty good chance we’re walking into the most heavily-defended HYDRA base left.”

That was... Steve thought of his last mission, when he'd put the plane into the ice. It had felt good then, to lie down and know it was over. This mission felt just the same.

* * *

**September 2014**

The mission went off the rails before they even landed the jet. JARVIS' voice filled the plane. "The team inside has been discovered. They are requesting assistance."

Natasha swore in Russian and grabbed the radio off the plane dashboard. "May, this is Romanoff. Please respond."

Clint, in the pilot seat, just shook his head. "I think she's a little busy, Tasha." A body flew out of one of the windows, proving his point, and plummeted towards the ground. Steve hoped it was a HYDRA agent and not one of May's people.

Natasha was right, because May responded about ten seconds later. "Romanoff, good to hear your voice. Can you confirm your identity?" The sound of gunfire drifted across the connection.

Natasha keyed her radio, a thoughtful look on her face. "Do you remember when Hill got her upstep to Commander and her little girl made her the bedazzled coffee mug that said Boss?"

"Acknowledged, Widow, and I remember we needed to pay her 20 bucks to make one for Phil so he'd stop whining."

Clint made a noise that could have been a laugh if he weren't grimacing. "I put the damn thing in his coffin. He loved that mug."

Sam, in the co-pilot seat, shot Steve a curious glance. He'd never heard of Agent Coulson and how he'd died because the Avengers couldn't get their act together. It still made Steve feel ashamed.

"Still getting Hawkeye to fly you around? Trip and I are pinned down in a break room on the top floor. Our backup is wounded, I'd rather not bring them into this mess. "

Steve took the microphone. "This is Steve Rogers. Ma'am, hold your position. Someone will be with you shortly. Just tell me where you're pinned down."

"Skye, get Captain America a map. No one say a word until we can all talk in person, are we understood?" May sounded out of breath.

Another woman said, "It's on its way," and a screen on the dashboard lit up. Steve looked at the map long enough to fix it in his mind and then went back to the passenger compartments where Bruce and Tony were holed up building some kind of EMP bomb. "If we jumped out of the back of this plane, could one of you catch me?"

Tony let the wire cutters fall out of his mouth. "Probably. What did you have in mind?"

* * *

Steve crashed through the roof of the building cradled in the Hulk’s arms. He’d always been a bit of an adrenaline junky and plummeting through the sky with Bruce, having to trust him to change in time, was a whole new level of reckless even for him. He could hear Sam cursing him out over the radio, talking about the perfectly good set of wings he had in their gear. Steve ignored him. Jumping with the Hulk was terrifying and the terror made him feel alive. It was the kind of stunt that used to make Bucky complain about Steve giving him ulcers, but Steve didn’t have to worry about upsetting him anymore.

He brushed the debris off his suit and clapped the Hulk on the shoulder. “Thanks for the assist. Head downstairs, clear a path for everyone else.”

The Hulk shook his head. “Staying.”

“Go downstairs and clear a path.” He could hear the rock music coming from Tony’s speakers intersped with repulsor blasts. “Iron Man will be here soon. Go, I’ll be fine.”

The Hulk loomed over him. Not many people could do that anymore. “Promise.”

“I can handle myself.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly, and the Hulk shook his head and lumbered off. Steve unslung his shield and headed for the room where May and Trip were pinned down.

There were five HYDRA operative standing in a semicircle in front of the door while a sixth was kneeling down in front of a steel security door, cutting through it with a blowtorch.

Steve tapped the guy standing in the middle on the shoulder. When he turned around, Steve punched him in the face. There was a moment where his four buddies just stared dumbly at their unconscious teammate before they swarmed him. The guy at the door was wearing ear protection and since no one bothered to tell him what was going on, he kept right on working. Steve thought he was humming something although he was too distracted to figure out what it was.

He tossed the shield at the guy on the right and let it ricochet off the wall to take out a second. After that, the other two were easy. He punched one out, caught the shield on its next ricochet as it passed by him, and used it to slam the last on against the wall.

Then, he had to wait for the last one to finish cutting through the door. It was taking way too long, HYDRA must have been skimping on his training. When the man was done, he turned around, smiling. It faded away as soon as he discovered his friends were all unconscious and the only thing behind him was an angry Captain America. When he decided to run rather than fight, Steve decided he wasn’t worth the effort to chase after, he just knocked on the door. “You’re all clear.”

May didn’t open the door, she kicked it open, forcing Steve to take a step back. She wasn’t holding a gun, she was wielding some kind of staff and her eyes scanned the room before she let the point drop. “Thanks for the assist, Captain.”

“Happy to help. You doing alright over there, Trip?” Trip was standing on his own power, even though Steve could tell he was wounded.

“I’m fine.” He jammed the knife he was holding back into his belt. “Just so you know, this was not our plan, things went a bit sideways after we got here.” He touched the transmitter in his ear. “Copy that, sir. That’s a no go on Skye hacking their systems. The authentication is quantum entangled, which as far as I know is a thing from video games, so we’re just going to have to trust her.”

Skye was the Level One, the one who’d killed Bucky and he was profoundly grateful he didn’t have to face her, save her. Who was he talking to? “I thought there were three of you?”

“No.” May didn’t elaborate and Steve was about to ask when she said, “I’ll explain everything later, this isn’t the time or place. We need to blow their computers, or in about twenty minutes every HYDRA asset left in the wild will know we’re here.”

Steve’s own earpiece chirped. It was Clint, panting. “Cap, we’ve got heavy resistance on the ground floor. There’s a couple of their homebrew super soldiers down there. The Hulk’s doing his best, but I’d put money on these guys having Hulkbuster training. We’re going to need another heavy.”

“Iron Man, change of plans. I’ve linked up with May and Trip, we’re going to blow the computers. Get downstairs and pitch in.”

“Cap, I don’t think-”

“Go.” He knew it was reckless. No one else was going to get hurt because of him. If Clint had asked for help, it had to be bad. “This isn’t up for discussion. May, I’m all yours. Tell me what you need.”

Steve could just barely hear the choked laughter from her communicator. May didn't react to the noise. “Follow me, then.”

They were on the top floor and the servers were five levels down. The three of them fought their way down through such minimal resistance that by the time they got to their destination Steve was sure it was a trap. “Any idea what’s behind that door?”

“Based on personal experience?” May braced herself, her staff at the ready. “A half dozen Centipede soldiers.”

“A half dozen? You took out a half dozen super soldiers at that last base?” Taking one out was impressive. Six was… “What exactly is that weapon you’re holding?”

“Not us.” Trip had taken out some kind of stun baton. “It’s kind of a long story.”

They weren’t exactly being forthcoming with information. Who knew what they’d been through since SHIELD fell? “I look forward to hearing it.”

A steady stream of noise drifted from Trip’s earpiece that Steve couldn’t quite get to resolve into words until he finally hissed, “You wanna come up here half-dead, take it up with the boss. Otherwise, shut up.”

Some people were bad at being out of commission. Steve would know, he was one of them. “What’s going to happen when we open this door?”

“We planned on sending a drone through the vents. They were wired, if you can believe that.” Trip sounded real put out by it. Steve wondered if that was when things had started to go wrong. If you wanted to keep Hawkeye out, it wasn’t a bad plan. Otherwise, it seemed a bit like overkill.

“It’s not going to be any less of a trap if we keep standing here.” May slid a card through the reader and the door opened.

There were four neat ranks of Centipede soldiers waiting inside, an even dozen of HYDRA’s best attempt to recreate Steve.

May slammed the door close button. “We’re going to need backup, now.”

“Jesus, how many of these guys did that woman make?” Trip smashed in the door electronics with the butt of his baton. That might buy them thirty seconds. “There’s more downstairs, too.”

“Raina escaped. I imagine she’s been busy.” May handed him her own stun baton. “Captain, these are powerful enough to take down their implants. We learned this the hard way, but I can’t promise she hasn’t improved on the design.”

The door started to rattle. “Okay, Tony. It really kills me to say this but you were right. You definitely should have come up here with me.”

“It’s nice to hear that, Cap,” A burst of repulsor fire blocked out all other sound for a moment, “Unfortunately, we’re all a bit busy down here. Thor’s enroute, assuming no one tries to shoot him down over the Atlantic again.”

The door wrenched open with a squeal of metal and the soldiers poured out. Steve’s world dissolved into a series of angles for shield throws. The only one who’d ever understood was Clint, whose mind did the same with arrow paths. He let the rhythm of the fight wash over him. He could still hear the Avengers on the coms. Natasha’s dry comments and Clint’s replies, Tony’s threats to call Pepper and let them see what a real Extremis enhancile was capable of, all sounded far away.

Whatever the staff May carried was, it had to be incredibly powerful. She was holding her own. Trip wasn’t doing so well. There were lots of reasons to help Trip, not the least of which was the thought of having to tell Peggy, over and over again, that her grandson had died on Steve’s watch. Three of the soldiers went down when he threw his shield. The way things were going, three seemed like a drop in the bucket.

“There’s too many.” Trip was shouting to whoever was on the other end of his communicator as Steve pulled one of the Centipede soldiers off him.

Whoever it was, they must have joined the fray down in the lobby because Natasha went silent. Clint's chatter cut off too and he asked someone, “How?” quiet and hurt.

This wasn’t like going up against a dozen human soldiers, or a dozen highly trained SHIELD agents. It wasn’t even like his terrible fights with Bucky in DC. It was closer to the horror of New York, fighting that never ending army of aliens. If there were reinforcements somewhere, things were going to get bad.

Steve’s armor was good, but it was still SHIELD issued until Tony got a few hours free to do a redesign. HYDRA obviously knew all the flaws, about how the back plates didn’t quite overlap enough.

He was stronger than them, one on one. Strenght wasn't enough, a Centipede soldier was more than capable of shoving a knife into his back, if they got the chance. Steve went down like a sack of concrete. He couldn’t feel anything below the knife and the soldier who’d stabbed him stood over him, a vicious little smile on his face. “It was all about the numbers, in the end.”

He had one of the stun batons and he brought it down on Steve’s chest. The world whited out in a fresh wave of agony and when things came back into focus Steve knew he wasn’t getting up from this. May was being overwhelmed and he desperately hoped his recklessness wasn’t going to get her and Trip killed, too.

Steve had to be dying, because there were suddenly two figures in the doorway. Angels, maybe, because one was Agent Coulson, dressed exactly like he’d been the day he died, carrying that massive ray gun. Beside him…

Beside him was Bucky, rifle unslung and looking furious. He shouted Steve’s name, promised he was coming to get him and Steve would have smiled if he wasn’t dying. Wherever they were going after this, they were going together.

Steve closed his eyes as the baton came down again and the world stopped. 

 


	7. Alpharetta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This is reckless even for you, Steve."

**August 2014**

“Evening, Mack.” They’d just let themselves in and commandeered his couch. Trip was smiling. The guy didn’t seem to find it very reassuring.

Mack froze in the doorway, his keys still dangling from one hand. “Trip. What are you doing here?” He gripped his keys, splaying them between his fingers. Smart choice. Bucky approved. "I don’t want any trouble.”

“We’re not here to make trouble.” Even though Mack Mack had been Trip's friend once, a lot had changed since DC. "I heard you were looking for work."

“Yeah, the whole division got laid off. By the CIA. At gunpoint.” Mack was checking his exits, and Bucky moved between him and the door. "Who's your friend, Trip?"

"This is Agent Barnes. He needs your help." That was Bucky's cue. He reached out and opened the long box they’d put on his coffee table. “You still like to tinker, right? You were always a hell of a mechanic."

Mack took one look in the box and went for his end table. They'd already taken the gun he'd stashed there, though, and he turned back empty handed. "No."

“No? Mack, I brought you an arm in a box. You love this stuff.” Trip sounded confused. “How are you passing this up?”

“I'm not stupid, Trip. Everyone knows Garrett and Ward were dirty. You expect me to believe you weren't? Also, your friend,” Bucky could see him start to sweat, “Almost killed Captain America on live TV. I will not help you put the Winter Soldier back in action.”

Bucky was, at the same time, grateful Steve had knocked off his mask and irritated so many people has seen his face. “We’re not HYDRA and I’m not the Winter Soldier. We’re SHIELD and this is a job offer. Director Coulson wants to see you.”

Mack was eyeing the arm, like he wanted to believe just so he could play with it. "Coulson's dead.”

“It’s a long story.” Bucky closed the box back up, a little awkwardly one handed. “If you’re not interested, we can go. We'll try that guy who worked for Blake. Bennie something. He's supposed to be a mechanical genius.”

“Wait.” Mack grabbed the strap of the bag. "It's a cybernetic arm, man. If you’re not HYDRA, I can't pass that up.”

* * *

Maybe they should have gone with Bennie after all. Mack was a mechanical engineer, his experience was with cars and planes, he’d never worked on person.

"The wiring is sort of beyond me." At least Mack was honest. "I heard Agent Fitz-"

"No." Jemma looked like she'd been punched. "Fitz isn't ready. We'll just have to do our best."

Bucky had survived Zola’s serum, and he’d spent seventy years in the not-so-gentle care of various HYDRA agents. All that taken into consideration, the moment Mack reattached his arm was the worst pain Bucky had ever felt.

According to Jemma, the arm hooked into his brachial plexus, whatever that was. When the arm was working well, Bucky could feel pressure, heat and cold. Even when it had been malfunctioning, it had never hurt before. It was like being stabbed with a thousand knives and electrocuted at the same time. Anyone else would have screamed. Bucky would have screamed, if he had any air left in his lungs.

Jemma did it for him. “Off! Take it off!” Jemma, practically an expert at it by now, wrenched the arm free of its socket. “Bucky? Are you still with us?”

“I’m still here.” They still weren’t sure exactly what precise voltage and how much of it was necessary to wake up the Winter Soldier, so Bucky was pretty damn grateful to still be awake. He touched his face, surprised to find it wet. “Can we not do that again?”

“I’m sorry.” Mack looked horrified. "Look, Simmons, the man is not a car. This is way outside my job description."

“Figure it out. We don't have any other options.”

Mack picked the arm back up, a look of concentration on his face. "I'll look at the manual again. Have I mentioned how disturbing it is that a human being has a manual?"

Jemma practically threw him out of sickbay not listening to his, in Bucky's opinion, valid concerns. “So, that went poorly.”

The smell of hot metal still hung in the air and Bucky was fighting the urge to run, to hide. “I hadn’t noticed.”

She pressed a hand to his forehead, frowning. “I know this is hard on you. Can I get you anything?”

“Steve.” He figured Steve owed him about five years of nursemaiding before they were even. Since he’d found out Steve was alive, he could hardly think of anything else.

“I was thinking more along the lines of a pain killer you wouldn’t immediately metabolize.” She patted him on the knee then helped him sit up. “Stay right here. I’m just going to get a needle.”

* * *

“I’m just saying, she implied-”

“Can we not talk about this?” Cooking one handed was an adventure, even when Trip wasn’t asking intrusive questions. “If I give you a grilled cheese, will you let this go?” Trip held out a plate and Bucky slid a sandwich onto it. “Were you seriously interrogating me about my family to get a hot lunch?”

“Not just for the hot lunch. I can make my own grilled cheese if I have to; no one else can tell me this stuff. You are the holy grail of Cap trivia. Can’t blame a man for trying.” Trip’s soup dinged in the microwave and he went to get it. “I’ve got a copy on my tablet, if you want to read it.”

“No.” His sister had lived a long life, a happy one as far as Bucky had been able to piece together. If he wanted details he would have to read her book and he just couldn’t. “She was my sister and she had a thing for Steve. I don’t need to read her book to know that. Besides, she never saw me again after they shipped me out. Her brother died, she wouldn’t recognize me if she was still around.”

“Rogers recognized you.” Trip slid a second bowl of soup across the table to Bucky. It skittered past him and crashed to the floor. Bucky had reached for it with the hand that was currently sitting in Jemma’s lab. “Sorry.”

“You’re the one that has to clean it up.” The last chapter of Becca’s book was the letter Steve had written their mother after he fell from the train. He didn’t need to see that. 

* * *

The Winter Soldier had been the apex pursuit predator. Until Pierce had sent him after Steve, the Winter Soldier had never failed to complete a mission. Bucky drew on some of that now, trying to find Steve. He was maybe in a bit deep when May’s voice startled him so badly he almost dropped his tablet. “We’re down two agents and we’re two weeks from your estimate for HYDRA’s communications coming back online.”

It was unnerving, how quiet she could be. “Talk to Mack. I’m ready when he is. I’m not much good in a fight like this.” Theoretically, with a forearm grip, he could fire a rifle one handed. It wasn’t something he wanted to test in a firefight.

“We can’t wait for him to figure it out. Find another way.” She took the tablet from him and touched it to hers. “Skye found the communications hub. You have a week.”

“A place like that is going to be armed to the teeth. No way you and Trip can do it on your own.” He took his tablet back, mind already turning the idea around.

“Find a way.” She had done the digital equivalent of dumping a pile of file folders in his lap and she walked away without waiting for a response.

He stopped her before she got to the doorway. “Do you have a reason not to trust the Avengers?” It wasn’t his nature to trust anymore, not anyone but Steve, and Steve had fought beside them. The Widow, at least, had Steve's complete trust.

“I trust Romanoff. I trust Barton, as far as anyone does. Not Stark. He hacked SHIELD during the Battle for New York.” Her voice had the undertones of quiet but powerful rage. “He had access to all our secrets, all of HYDRA’s secrets. He must have seen and he did nothing.”

“You’re saying Iron Man is HYDRA.” Bucky could barely get the words out, it sounded so ridiculous.

“I’m saying Howard Stark brought Zola, the man who tortured and experimented on you, into SHIELD. He brought HYDRA into SHIELD and let it grow like a cancer and his son ignored the evidence.”

She didn’t know. Of course, no one had asked. “Howard wasn’t HYDRA.”

“Howard Stark lived a long life. He was an alcoholic and his own family could barely stand him.”

“Howard wasn’t HYDRA. I know because I was sent to kill him.” A company called Roxxon had been looking to get rid of him and HYDRA decided to kill two birds with one stone and make some money on the deal.

"So Howard's hands were clean. Can you say the same about Tony's?"  
  
"I think if Tony Stark was HYDRA, the Winter Soldier would have known." The man had ridden a bomb into outer space to save New York. "I read the files. The Director hand-picked the Avengers. He included Stark over some pretty serious objections, before Fury played Frankenstein with him. You’re letting him sit in the big chair. Am I supposed to trust his judgment or not?"

May was compromised about Coulson and Bucky knew she wasn’t willing to admit it. "Plan it out. Assume the Hulk is coming along for the ride. Doctor Banner has been living with Stark in New York."  
\---  
"Do you think it would be possible for me to speak to Doctor Banner after the mission?" Jemma was peering over his shoulder. "If he was willing to consult on Coulson's case, it would be very helpful."

"I'll ask." Bucky was still trying to figure out the Hulk's threat potential. It seemed unlimited which was worrisome. No wonder he been at the top of HYDRA's hit list. "Any chance I'll be back in action in time?"

"Mack is doing his best." Jemma probably thought she sounded diplomatic. She wasn’t quite pulling it off. The man wasn’t Fitz, that meant he was never going to live up to her standards. "If we get it wrong, it's not just that we could hurt you. We could erase you. I'll see how far along he is." 

* * *

He still dreamed. It was worse now that he knew the truth.

Post-Serum Steve, dressed in the suit, touching his face and saying, "Your eyes are so blue. Why didn't you ever tell me?"

And worse, a 30 year old Alexander Pierce coming into his cell and taking his hand and asking for his help to save the world. Bucky pretty much gave up on sleep after that.

It was three in the morning when he wandered by and saw light spilling out from under the door of the server room. Bucky tried the door. It swung open.

Skye lay on the table, staring at projections on the ceiling and talking to someone on the coms. “Agent Triplett will go in through the vents and plant charges in the server room. Do you think the reception desk will recognize Doctor Banner?”

Bucky pulled up a chair. The voice on the coms had to be her contact with Stark Industries.

“Doctor Banner successfully lived in New York for two years without detection. I will concede that was before the leak. However, even if he is immediately recognized, what could they do to harm him?”

“Good point.” Skye made a gesture and the projection changed. “Has Hawkeye committed?”

“He agreed to fly the team in and will assist in the distraction strike at reception.” The man’s voice hesitated for a moment. “Mr. Lydon has asked about you again.”

“Miles can ask about me all he wants. I don’t have time for him.” A timer went off and Skye fumbled for a dish on the table beside her. “Jarvis, can we take a break? I may try and get an hour of sleep.”

“I highly support you getting some rest, Miss Skye. You may call me when you are ready to resume work.”

“Goodnight.” Skye swallowed a few pills as the line went dead. “It’s the middle of the night, Barnes. Don’t you sleep?”

“No more than you do.” Skye looked worn down, burns were painful. “Are we sure that guy’s legit?”

“Coulson vouched for him.” Her eyes drifted shut. “Said we could trust him. He’s Tony Stark’s keeper or something. He has access to all their data servers and he can hack like nothing I’ve ever seen. And the accent. I really like the British accent.”

“Do you need help up?” He didn’t really think he should let her sleep here and he wasn’t going to touch her to move her if she drifted off.

“I’m good. I think I’m going to ask him out for coffee when this is over.” Bucky wondered how long she’d been awake. The room was littered with empty coffee cups and cans of energy drinks. “Third time’s the charm, right?”

He had no idea what she was talking about, and it seemed like a bad time to dig into her personal life. Someone had left a blanket thrown over a chair, apparently this wasn’t the first time she’d done this. Bucky pulled it over her.

"I didn't tell him about you or Coulson. I couldn’t figure out how to do it without sounding nuts. Hey, remember that guy in the suit who died? Fury pulled a Dr. Frankenstein and he's back. And Bucky Barnes? Yeah, we kidnapped him from a gas station parking lot and put him to work."

"Don't worry about it." He wanted to see Steve face to face, wondered if this kind of mission would draw him home. Bucky's obsessive internet searches had turned up a dedicated group of fans who were tracking his every move. Steve wasn't alone, he was traveling with Sam Wilson. Bucky wondered if he'd been replaced with a newer, shinier and whole Sergeant. "It's not the kind of thing you try and explain over the phone. Do you really want to sleep here?"

“If I move, I’ll wake myself up.” Skye made another gesture at the ceiling and the room went dark. “Hey, Barnes? I’m sorry I shot you.” 

* * *

**September 2014**

Bucky and Skye had crafted a solid plan, so of course it went wrong immediately.

Skye and Coulson stayed in the van with him, all three of them basically the walking wounded while May and Trip broke in through the roof. Stark and Banner were supposed to come through the front door as a distraction.

"This is embarrassing." Never in his life had Bucky stayed behind while his team went into danger.

"Stop complaining." An audio and video feed was coming from Trip's rigging as he worked his way through the vents. "I'm sorry your awesome bionic arm is temporarily out of commission and you can't come crawl through the vents with me." Trip suddenly froze. "Got a problem. There's a pressure plate in the intersection in front of me."

"Okay, let's take our backup route." Skye studied the blueprints she had up and Bucky could see she'd already bitten her lip bloody. She'd skipped at least one dose of painkillers so she could be sharp enough to help. "Backtrack to the last junction. I'll take you the long way."

Coulson seemed okay, alert and himself. Bucky was keeping an eye on him, he’d been fooled before. "May, is your position still secure?"

"My position is an empty storage room. I'm fine." Her body camera was showing a steady view of the heavy door leading out to the hallway.

"Skye, I'm back at the junction."

"Hang a left, Trip." The dot representing him on her blueprints started to move. "You're going left at the next junction too."

For a minute, they could only hear breathing from his end, then a curse. "Pressure plate."

"Seriously?" Skye spun the blueprint on her screen, looking for another route. "Who puts sensors in the ductwork?"

"Someone who's seen Hawkeye break into secure bases like this. Which, admittedly, he did a lot. Sometimes under orders from people who turned out to be HYDRA." They hadn't let Coulson help plan things. It had seemed like a good idea after the fiasco of their last mission, although a fact like that would have been good to know.

"Retreat back to the entrance, Trip. We're hosed." Skye flung the projection away. "I can’t find a way through."

"We need to stop Stark from attacking." Bucky grabbed Skye's phone and started dialing. He shoved it back at her. "Tell them to fall back."

A loud noise rang out over the coms and May's camera wasn't showing the door anymore. "Too late. They know we're here. A security guard just stopped me. Going after him."

Alarms started going off in the building just as the phone connected to Jarvis. Bucky hoped he was on the plane with Stark. Skye juggled the phone with her damaged hands and brought it to her ear. "Jarvis, this is Skye. We're made. We're going to need some help upstairs."

"I've alerted the Avengers, Miss. Someone will be coming to assist you."

"May, help's on the way." A window blew out on the security feed and Skye whistled. "Nice hit. If you can get back into the room, I'll fuse the lock."

A call came in over SHIELD's old secure frequency. "May, this is Romanoff. Please respond."

The Widow. Bucky listened to her and May do some kind of coded verification involving a coffee mug before a man's voice said, "I put the damn thing in his coffin. He loved that mug."

Coulson gave his coffee mug a vaguely horrified look. "May, by 'I found your mug' did you mean you stole it from my grave?"

"Now is not the time, Phil." Natasha Romanoff hadn’t been part of the mission plan. May hated surprises as much as Bucky, even if the Black Widow was a known quantity to her.

And then it got worse, because he would know Steve's voice anywhere. "Ma'am, hold your position. Someone will be with you shortly. Just tell me where you're pinned down."

"Found you," Bucky whispered. Steve had always had a talent for turning up where he wasn't supposed to be, like a bad penny.

"It's on its way." Skye sent May and Trip's position, then turned to him. "So, this is convenient."

"That's a word for it." Coulson was watching the plane make a pass over the building, blinking a few times in confusion. Two shapes were falling from the tail. "Someone just jumped."

"They're too low for shoots. The Falcon?" Bucky knew he was wrong almost instantly. One of the shapes was rapidly growing larger. The Hulk crashed through the roof of the building holding something blue. "Did everyone else see that?"

"I saw." Coulson switched the monitor to the interior view just in time to see Steve picking a fight with a group of HYDRA agents. "Trip, find the computer terminal in that room. Plug in the drive Skye gave you, maybe we don't have to make it to the server room."

There was something inhuman about the way Steve fought. Bucky had always loved to watch him, and Coulson seemed mesmerized too until the guy who'd been burning his way into May and Trip's fallback position ran away instead of fighting.

Downstairs, the Hulk had joined the fray. The HYDRA agents didn't seem frightened though. "Trip, combat's heating up downstairs. How's the computer?"

May and Trip were deflecting questions, trying to keep the mission on the rails and Bucky wanted to reach through the radio and smack Steve on the head when he sent Iron Man away. "This is reckless even for you, Steve." Bucky repositioned one of the drones to follow Steve as they fought their way to the server room. "Trip, I can't get a good look at him. Can you do a pan for me with your camera?" The suit was intact, no signs of injury. "Why won't he let anyone help? How well do you know him, Trip?" All he got back was an exasperated sigh. "I'm telling you, this isn't normal. He does crazy thing sometimes, like letting some mad scientist experiment on him. I need you to keep an eye on him."

"You wanna come up here half dead, take it up with the boss. Otherwise, shut up and let me work."

They cracked the door for the server room and the force inside far exceeded what Bucky and May had projected. May slammed the door shut. "We're going to need backup, now."

"Where is it?" Bucky started yanking open bins.

"Where's what?" Coulson had backed out of the way.

"My arm. I know Jemma packed it." It was under the bench seat. Mack had finished his second attempt at fixing the arm last night, too late for a test. Bucky shoved the arm at Coulson. "Help me put it on."

Coulson hesitated, glancing at the monitors. Upstairs, Steve was being swarmed and downstairs HYDRA was spraying some kind of foam at the Avengers. It only seemed to affect the Hulk, who fell to the floor shuddering. That seemed to unnerve Coulson and he took Bucky's arm and jammed it into the socket.

Bucky braced himself for the pain. It never came. There was no sensation at all, actually. He tried to wriggle his fingers and they moved. The motion felt far away, like it was happening to someone else. "Good enough. Plug the servos in."

Bucky breathed, eyes tightly shut, while Coulson worked on him. He'd gotten used to Jemma, letting someone else work on him was still enough to make him want to puke. When the last bolt was in, he reached out for his rifle, fumbling. Fighting without any feedback was going to be tough. There wasn’t time to mess around with it, he had to get to Steve.

"Pass me the ray gun." Coulson was putting an earpiece in. "I'm coming with you."

"Coulson-" Skye had a dozen reasons not to want Coulson go into the field. Coulson wasn’t even going to listen to one.

"No more hiding. There are lives at stake, my friends' lives. I'm going." He took the big gun from Bucky. "Stay here, you need to direct us."

"You're both crazy." She tossed Bucky an earpiece, too. "Don't get hit in the head. The Avengers are strangers, we don't know how the Winter Soldier will react."

"I'll do my best." He would also do his best to keep Coulson alive, to bring him back to her. "Let's go."

The lobby was a war zone. Iron Man was firing in waves, herding the HYDRA agents and Centipede soldiers into the center of the room. The Black Widow must have had some kind of stun device strapped to her hands, because anyone she touched ended up writhing on the ground.

Hawkeye was couched behind the Hulk's prone body, shooting electrified arrows at the Centipede soldiers. "Come on, big guy, wake up. Please." He must have caught the movement of the door opening out of the corner of his eye because his gaze swung to Bucky and Coulson. "How?"

Coulson fired his gun at the mass of HYDRA agents, scattering them. "We need to get upstairs."

Hawkeye's mouth opened and no sound came out. The Widow, at least, seemed to understand their sense of urgency. "Get out of their way. Cap's up there and he needs help." She gave Clint a whack that gave Bucky a sickening reminder of Pierce and he reached for another arrow.

"You are in so much trouble." Iron Man blasted open a path for them. "I hope whatever cave you've been hiding in is well hidden, because Pepper may kill you for not being dead."

Coulson picked his way over bodies to the stairwell, his 'Agent' face a match to May's. "We can discuss this later, Stark. Barnes, this way."

"Wait, who?" Hawkeye's voice followed them into the stairwell.

It was an easy climb to the fifth floor. Before he opened the door, Bucky checked Coulson over. "If you can't do this, tell me now. If you go away during the fight, they'll kill you."

"I can handle it." Coulson reached past him and pulled the door open.

They got to the server room and Bucky's heart thudded in his chest. "Steve!" He was on the ground, bleeding. "I'm here, Steve. Hold on, I'm getting you out of here." Steve met his gaze and it was like all the fight drained out of him. The Centipede soldier standing over him was holding one of those stun batons and he brought it down on Steve's chest.

Bucky couldn't remember aiming or firing. All of a sudden the back of the Centipede Soldier's head blew out and Bucky found his finger on the trigger.

He lined up another headshot, then just kept going without counting. It was quick and clean. They screamed when Coulson disintegrated them, and Bucky left some for him. The ones he shot didn't suffer. A part of him wanted them to.

Bucky watched the last one drop with a grim sense of satisfaction and made his way to Steve. He was alive, a knife protruding from his back. Bucky had stabbed too many men to count, he'd be surprised if the blade had missed the liver. Even for Steve that had to be bad news. "Steve?" He was out cold. "Skye, we need help. Steve's hurt."

He could hear a hint of panic in his own voice. Bucky knew a lot of ways to kill a person but hardly any field medicine. He missed Morita and the way the man had always seemed so calm bandaging them up.

"Working on it. You do remember that between the two of us we have exactly five working fingers and you have them?" She was trying to distract him from his rising panic. It wasn’t working very well.

Bucky pulled Steve's helmet off. Coulson was hovering and May was still carrying the staff. "I'm still me. It's not the first time I've killed a room full of people to get to him."

"Let me see him." It was Bruce Banner, half dressed and filthy. Coulson, May and Trip closed ranks, trying to block him. "You don't know what it's like, when he's hurt. Make a hole and let me through or I'll make my own." His eyes flashed green and Coulson stepped aside. "Thank you."

Bruce knelt down next to Steve. "You must be Bucky. We need to take the knife out before he starts to heal around it. Can you hold him still?"

"Yeah." He could barely tell what he was doing with the cybernetic arm. Bucky was as gentle as possible as he gathered Steve into his lap and held him while Bruce pulled the knife out.

The fight downstairs must have wrapped up, because the Avengers were suddenly loitering in the doorway. Bucky could have cared less. "You idiot. What were you thinking?"

Bruce had a wadded up shirt and he pressed it to the wound. "Pressure here. Can you carry him?"

Bucky scooped Steve up, as easy with his enhancements as it had been a lifetime ago when Steve had been ninety pounds, and headed for the elevator.

"Natasha," Coulson sounded wary. "This isn't-"

"Save it." She hit the down button for Bucky and leaned against the wall next to Clint. "Got any other dead people stashed in a hidey hole? Hand, maybe. That woman was efficient."

Coulson's mask cracked a little. "No. Hand died at the Fridge."

"You were dead." Clint was clutching his bow white knuckled as the elevator made its interminable climb from the lobby. "It wasn't a lie. I saw you in a drawer. You'd been autopsied. I had to tell Audrey."

"And this is why I wanted to wait until after the fight." The elevator doors creaked open and May put her hand on the sensor. "Barnes, you first." 

* * *

None of the Avengers seemed capable of shutting up. The grousing had erupted into three screaming fights already. May had given up mediating and was aggressively reading a magazine while pretending the rest of them didn’t exist. They only seemed willing to shut up when when a doctor came to tell them Steve had survived surgery.

Bucky left them all eyeing each other suspiciously. Only Sam noticed him leaving and passed him an iPod. "I've been working on his musical education. It can't hurt."

"Thanks." Bucky slid the player into his jacket. Sam had been trailing after Steve for months and Bucky found himself looking for mouth shaped bruises or hand prints. Jealously was an ugly thing. "When he wakes up, is he gonna want you with him instead of me?"

"Nah." Sam glanced back over his shoulder at Natasha. "Get out of here before they start yelling again."

Steve's hospital room was quiet and cool. Bucky took out the iPod and stared at the earbuds for a long moment before he remembered Steve didn't have a bad side anymore. He put one earbud in Steve's ear and the other in his own then pressed play. He sat down in an uncomfortable chair, pillowed his head on his arms and shuddered. Bucky had sat beside Steve’s bed like this too many times, waiting to see whether he’d live or die. "Thought we were done with this sitting next to your bed waiting to see if you're going to wake up thing."

He closed his eyes and let the music wash over him.

"No."

Bucky's head shot up. Steve was awake. "No what?"

"No, I won't." Steve was restrained because of the surgery. The struggling couldn’t be good for his stitches.

"Steve, lie still." Bucky curled human fingers around one of Steve's wrists, hoping it felt familiar. "You're alright, you're safe."

Steve was trying to focus through what must have been enough sedation to put out an elephant. Bruce hadn’t taken any chances Steve would wake up on the table. "Bucky?"

He sounded happy to see him, at least. "Hey, Steve."

Steve slumped back, pliant and limp. He tangled his fingers with Bucky's. "Bucky, don't make me stay here alone. Please."

"You're hurt." If he needed to not be here, Bucky could get him out. He wasn't sure trading one hospital for another would help. He could take Steve to Jemma, but all her experience was with the Centipede and Winter Soldier formulations. "You're going to be fine, though." It was better for him to stay here where Bruce could treat him.

"I don't want to be fine." Steve's grip turned to iron. "I want to go with you. Don't make me stay here. I can't do this again."

"Alright." When Steve dropped off again, Bucky would go talk to Bruce. Maybe he'd be interested in consulting with Jemma and would be willing to come along.

"Thank you." Steve's fingers went slack. "Don’t be angry at me. I just wanted to be with you again. I wasn’t expecting Agent Coulson to be with you, we let him down so badly.”

“You think Coulson is bad you should spend some time with Agent Triplett. He’s nosey.”

At the mention of Trip, Steve looked away. “Peggy’s never going to forgive me.”

Something was very wrong here. Bucky turned Steve’s head back towards him. “For what? Scaring me half to death?”

Steve dodged the question. “How'd you meet Agent Coulson anyway?"

"I'll tell it to you later. Let's just say I remembered this you and the other you, but not that you took the serum." He stroked Steve's hair a few times, greedy to touch, not having done so in a lifetime and then some. "I thought you were dead, so I went looking for someone who hated HYDRA as much as I did."

"And that girl shot you in the head." Bucky hardly ever had heard Steve's voice sound so bitter.

"Skye?" How had he known about that? It didn't make Skye look good, shooting him like that. Steve didn't like people who mistreated prisoners. He and Skye were good now, although maybe he wouldn't tell Steve about her coming into his room armed that night.

"I saw it. You were surrendering, and she killed you." Steve's voice broke and Bucky realized what Steve had been asking him, when he'd said he wanted to leave. "I promised Sam and I promised you, but I can't, Bucky. I can't. I'm done."

"Steve, I'm not dead." He knew what it was like, to be haunted by ghosts. Maybe Steve had been too. "I'm holding your hand. It's me. I'm real, I'm here."

"Doesn't mean anything." Maybe Steve was better at self-deception than Bucky. It wouldn't be the first time.

How long had he thought Bucky was dead? He'd been with SHIELD for months. "Steve, I know you don't believe me, but I'm here. Rest, okay? I'll still be here when you wake up and then we can talk."

"Okay." Steve's eyelids had started to droop. He sounded smaller than he had in years. Decades. Whatever, it wasn't important now. "And I can go with you?"

"Yeah, Steve. Anything you want." Steve was in such bad shape Bucky couldn't even appreciate that he was still wanted. He stayed and watched Steve sleep, not even daring to leave to shower.

Eventually, Skye came to check on him. She slid into the second guest chair, bandaged hands resting in her lap. She'd taken her pain killers, he could tell because she wasn't so tense anymore. "We're heading out. Agent Hartley made contact. Apparently this fiasco impressed her. She and her people are signing on."

"Good."

"How long have you know Coulson was sick?" His silence was all the answer she needed. "No wonder he's been avoiding me. It's obvious, once you know where to look. The Black Widow was yelling at Coulson about trust, and then she just sort of stopped. He was drawing on the table."

"It was his call. And May's." This was probably not a good time to mention the lies of omission he'd been given. Bucky was just going to let it go.

Steve's bruises were healing as they watched. Skye stared for a moment, hypnotized, then shook it off. "The superheroes sort of lost steam after that and we're getting some new house guests back at base. Barton's coming with us now. Should I let him have your bunk?"

"For this trip." He couldn't leave Steve. "He told me he wanted to come with me. He didn’t know what he was saying, I don’t think he understands what’s going on." Steve had talked to him like Bucky used to talk to his hallucination. "Job's not done, I know that."

"We know you're coming back, we have all your stuff." She pushed herself to her feet and actually gave him a hug. "I'm glad someone got what they wanted out of this mess. See you later, Barnes."

 


	8. Epilogue - Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He woke up.

He woke up.

For months, only his anger had kept him going. It was the thought of destroying HYDRA that had gotten him out of bed every morning. All that anger had leached out of him with his blood in that server room in Georgia. Now, Steve was waking up and he had nothing.

He had seen Bucky coming for him, he hadn't imagined that. To wake up again, after that, was a cruel joke. Maybe it was the serum. Maybe he wasn't allowed to die.

Someone was at his bedside and he could hear music from his right. Not 'Trouble Man' this time, Sam had changed it up. "No Marvin Gaye?"

"Who?"

It was Bucky's voice and Steve's eyes flew open. He was in a hospital bed, and Bucky was sitting next to him. Steve had so many things he wanted to say, about missing him, about how losing Bucky had almost killed him. What came out was, "That's a SHIELD uniform."

"You wouldn't let me leave. I haven't even showered." Bucky was sprawled in a chair like he hadn't been dead for months. Maybe Steve was losing his mind. "You scared the hell out of me. What's the point of having a squad if you don't let them help you?"

Steve reached for him, almost expecting him to dissolve. Instead he made contact with metal.

"Careful." Bucky offered his other hand and Steve gripped it tightly. "My pressure sensors are all offline. Can't feel a damn thing right now."

"You're alive." Steve gave his sleeve a tug and Bucky came closer. Steve touched his face, he was unshaven and streaked with dirt, and Steve just didn't care.

"I could say the same. I thought you were dead for months." Bucky leaned into his touch, just like he used to. "And then I couldn't find you."

"I saw Agent Coulson?" Steve hoped that didn't sound too crazy.

"Director, actually. Yeah, he helped me save your stupid life."

"Director of what?" Setting aside the fact that the man was back from the dead, they'd levelled his organization.

"Of SHIELD." Bucky was smiling, he didn't know what Fury had promised.

"Typical." Steve didn't know why he was surprised that Fury had lied to his face. Maybe it was foolish to believe they were past that. "You're okay? You're.... you?" He remembered Natasha's warnings, that he might not be Bucky even if he wasn't the Winter Soldier.

"Close enough for government work." It was just enough fake bravado in that to be convincing.

Yes, Bucky desperately needed a shower and Steve was sure he wasn't much better. "Come up here. Lie down with me."

"You’re half dead and I'm wearing body armor. I’m not exactly very cuddly at the moment." He was taking off his boots and bullet proof vest and climbing in beside Steve though.

They fit, barely, on their sides lying nose to nose. Steve pressed his face into Bucky's neck and put his arms around him. "When I thought you were gone, that I'd lost you again, I had nothing left, not even the mission. Stop leaving me."

"Same to you, punk, I'm not going anywhere." Bucky pressed a kiss to the top of his head.

He was real, solid and warm and Steve dragged him just a little bit closer. Eventually he wanted to know everything, how he was himself again, how he’d found May and Coulson. Right now, it was good enough to just be with Bucky. “Say something. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and you’ll be dead again.”

“I’m here, and I’m staying with you. The first thing I remembered was you, Steve, and how much trouble you get into." Bucky tilted his chin up and kissed him. “You crazy idiot.”

“I’m not the one who keeps dying.” Steve tugged him in for another kiss, deeper this time. His insides hurt like crazy, but he didn’t want to stop.

Someone cleared their throat. Steve froze.

"Hey, Steve." Sam sounded cheerful to be interrupting them. "Just thought you should know you're still hooked up to all these monitors. But if you're into that and want to keep going anyway, Natasha says you're blocking the shot."


End file.
